

PERENNIAL 
REVIVAL 



W M. B. RILEY 




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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



THE PEEENNIAL EEYIVAL 



The Perennial Revival 
A Plea for Evangelism 



BY 

WILLIAM B. RILEY, 

PASTOR FIRST BAPTIST CHURCH, 

MINNEAPOLIS. 

Author of "THE SEVEN CHURCHES OF ASIA," 

•THB GOSPEL IN JONAH," "VAGARIES AND VERITIES," ETC. 



CHICAGO: 

THE WINONA PUBLISHING COMPANY, 
1904 



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Two Oouies Heceived | 


JUN 


22 1904 


dLASS CL XXo. No. 

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COPY B 



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COPYRIGHT, 1904, 

BY 

THE WINONA PUBUSHING COMPANY. 



PAUL TO TIMOTHY: 

"Preach the Word; be instant in season, out of season; . . do 
the work of an evangelist, fulfil thy ministry." 



PREFACE 

For full fifteen years Evangelism has been 
on the decline in this country. In the early 
ministry of Mr. Moody "soul-winning" was his 
watchword, and the results were more pro- 
nounced and satisfactory than ever appeared 
after this mighty man of God turned his at- 
tention to the correction of church-ianity. 
Just now the cry of "Evangelism'' has been 
taken up again, and the hope of a widespread 
revival is giving expression to prayers and shape 
to plans. The cry is worthy "the Church of 
God." If this volume adds aught to the reali- 
zation of "A Perennial Eevival" the writer will 
be most content with his reward. To make a 
contribution to such a result is co-operation and 
companionship with Him who came "to seek 
and to save that which was lost." 

W. B. R. 



CONTENTS 
Preface 7 

CHAPTER 

^I. The Imperative Need of a Perennial Re- 

*'^ vival 11 

II. The Primitive Church and the Perennial 

Revival 33 

III. The Apostolic Spirit and the Perennial 

Revival 51 

IV. The Place of Prayer in the Perennial Re- 

vival 68 

V. The Enduement of Power and the Peren- 
nial Revival 93 

VI. Six Pivotal Points in the Perennial Revival 111 

VII. The Regular Church Services and the Pe- 
rennial Revival 133 

VIII. Husbanding the Results of the Perennial 

Revival 157 

IX. The Relation of Street Preaching to the 

Perennial Revival 181 

X. The Relation of Pew Rentals to the Peren- 
nial Revival 203 

XI. The Relation of Bible Study to the Peren- 
^ nial Revival 227 

XII. The Relation of Giving to the Perennial 

Revival 251 

XIII. The Patron Evangelist of the Perennial 

Revival 267 

XIV. The Perennial Revival and the Reformation 

of Society 285 

XV. The Perennial Revival and World Evan- 
gelization 303 



THE IMPERATIVE NEED OF A 
PEEENNIAL REVIVAL. 



CHAPTEE I. 

THE IMPEEATIVE NEED OF A PEREN- 
NIAL KEVIVAL. 

^^Evangelism^^ is, at this moment, the watch- 
word of the churches. For the first time in 
many decades the watchword is worthy the 
followers of the Nazarene. With a strange 
unanimity, conservatives and critics alike, 
have accepted the term, and with one voice are 
calling for Evangelism. 

Do not ask what they mean by the term; 
that would divide our forces instantly into 
many factions. It is not to be expected that the 
Verbal Inspirationist and the Destructive Critic 
shall accept common definitions of any theme. 
And yet, even these may agree in their desire 
for a revival of the religion of Christ which 
shall be potent and permanent, provided the 
word "EevivaP^ is kept strictly to its original 
meaning. It is not to the term itself, but the 
uses to which it has been put that many object. 
They say it often describes a condition of un- 
reasonable excitement produced by appeals to 
the emotions of men and destined to end in 
little or no lasting good. 

13 



14 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

Occasions of complaint at this point have not 
been wanting. When we make only a mechan- 
ical appeal to the feelings of men, stirring in 
them more of physical excitement than of 
spiritual vision, our efforts result only in 
fanatical actions, transient professions, and 
newspaper puffs; few sinners are saved and no 
saints are refreshed. 

And yet, as against this fact, it remains true 
that the state of perennial revival is the normal 
state for the Church of Jesus Christ. The 
men who oppose that idea set themselves against 
apostolic religion and criticise the apostolic 
church, since the centuries have known few re- 
vivals such as that in which the Church of 
Jesus Christ originated. It is little wonder 
that people have always prayed, and continue 
to pray, for a duplicate of Pentecost. Adding 
to the church day by day those that are being 
saved is the ideal state. 

In discussing "The Imperative Need of a 
Perennial Eevival," it may be necessary to 
spend a moment on 

THE DEFINITION. 

Revival! What do we mean by it? Let the 
Standard Dictionary speak; "A renewal of 
special interest in, and attention to, religious 
services and duties and the subject of personal 



NEED OF A PERENNIAL REVIVAL 15 

salvation; a religious awakening." Who can 
object to the definition? Is not that exactly 
what the Psalmist meant when he cried, *^ilt 
Thou not revive us again that thy people may 
rejoice in Thee?" 

Many years ago we knew a church which had 
been without preaching for months ; it had wor- 
shiped only occasionally in a hired hall^ while 
divisions between official brethren distracted 
the forces of the institution which had once 
been God^s agency for saving men. A pastor 
was secured, a house was erected; services be- 
came regular; brotherly love displaced the old 
hatred and healed the differences; at the end 
of six months conversions began, and every com- 
munion witnessed new accessions to the organ- 
ized body of believers. The pastor's salary was 
doubled and paid with greater promptness; 
offerings to missions -multiplied many fold; 
the ''twice a month" preaching gave way to 
the employment of a pastor for all of his time ; 
the little body which had, for a long season, 
been without prestige in its association became 
one of the most influential. That was a re- 
vival ! 

Perennial! "Continuing through the year 
or through many years; unfailing; unceasing; 
as, perennial springs." The dictionary's figure, 
"As perennial springs," is a most happy one 



16 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

when applied to the problem of the church. 
Those of us who were brought up in the hill 
country of the South appreciate the difference 
between the wet weather and the perennial 
spring. Many a time in the rainy season we 
have driven our knees into the black loam of 
a newly cleared hillside and drank from a 
vein, full today, but destined to fail tomorrow. 
The water was always sorry stuff and was always 
used as a makeshift of indolence, since the 
perennial spring was at the foot of the hill, and 
to enjoy it imposed a walk in going and work 
in returning. And yet the cold refreshing 
draught from the latter always sent one back 
to his service with a sense of compensation. 
The springs of revival which have characterized 
recent centuries have been too much after the 
wet-weather sort; they have opened only at a 
certain season and remained in action for a 
very short time. Our fathers in the faith be- 
haved as if they believed the streams of salva- 
tion were closed the rest of the year; and one 
man, at least, brought up in a church where 
that idea of a revival obtained, will never for- 
get the utter disappointment, the despair akin 
to that which must characterize the damned, 
when the annual meeting of two weeks had 
closed and left him unsaved. He was like the 
man in the Bethesda porch. He had seen the 



NEED OF A PERENNIAL REVIVAL 17 

waters troubled at a ^^certain season'^ and 
others stepping in to be made whole, while he 
must remain in his paralysis; for the waters 
grew quiet, and he knew that it would be a 
twelve-month before the opportunity would re- 
turn. Strange to say, his seniors seemed also 
to forget that Jesus was at hand and could 
work the miracle of healing out of season. We 
believe that the very bitterness of that ex- 
perience gave origin to the idea of this book, 
and emphasis to a ministry which, for twenty 
years, has sought as assiduously to reach men's 
souls in the dog-days of August as in the ap- 
pointed season of January. 

Perennial ! Is not that the word upon which 
we are to lay emphasis if we are rightly to inter- 
pret the injunction of Paul to Timothy, 
"Preach the word. Be urgent in season, out of 
season" ? 

With this definition of the Perennial Eevival 
before us, let us pass on to the discussion of 

THE NECESSITY. 

The very word "necessity" removes us from 
the realm of argument. There are voices more 
eloquent than were ever heard upon platform, 
pleading this necessity; there are silences more 
urgent than the voices of angels. 

The prayer of the saint pleads it. 



18 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

It is a blessed fact that regenerate men are 
ill-content to lead a languid Christian life, or 
to see their churches experience the same. Wil- 
liam Cowper's hymn is now seldom sung in 
the sanctuary, but we believe it is often repeated 
in the closet: 

"0 for a closer walk with God, 

A calm and heavenly frame, 
A light to shine upon the road 
That leads me to the Lamb! 

Where is the blessedness I knew 
When first I saw the Lord? 

Where is the soul-refreshing view 
Of Jesus and His word? 

What peaceful hours I then enjoyed! 

How sweet their memory still! 
But they have left an aching void 

The world can never fill. 

Return, O Holy Dove, return. 

Sweet messenger of rest; 
I hate the sins that made thee mourn, 

And drove thee from my breast. 

The dearest idol I have known, 

Whate'er that idol be, 
Help me to tear it from thy throne, 

And worship only thee." 

There are men and women in our churches — 
thank God for them — ^who feel that there is 



NEED OF A PERENNIAL REVIVAL 19 

something wrong with them when soul-winning 
ceases and the church becomes content in her 
barrenness. It is claimed that when Tulley 
was banished from Italy and Demosthenes from 
Athens they were never able to look toward 
their home-lands without bursting into sobs — 
such was their desire to be in their father- 
lands again. There are men and women to 
whom the presence and evident favor of God 
is dearer than fair Italy's skies and landscapes 
were beautiful to her native born, and for whom 
the thought of His lost love is more difficult 
to bear than was banishment from the streets 
of the world's most intellectual city. If one 
wants to feel the necessity of a revival let him 
go with such into their closets of prayer and 
listen while they cry to God, ^^ilt Thou be 
angry with us forever? Wilt Thou draw out 
Thine anger to all generations? Wilt Thou 
not revive us again that Thy people may rejoice 
in Thee?'' 

But we have said there are silences more 
eloquent still. Think of the sanctuaries, in 
country places and at the centers of great cities 
which were once crowded with ardent worship- 
ers, but now reveal to the Sabbath-traveling 
public closed doors or discouragingly small con- 
gregations. Think of the churches, better filled, 
but Spirit-deserted and dead. Charles Spur- 



20 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

geon says, '^Have you ever read "The Ancient 
Mariner"? I dare say you thought it one of 
the strangest imaginations ever put together, 
especially that part where the old mariner 
represents the corpses of dead men rising up to 
man the ship. Dead men pulling the ropes, 
dead men at the oars, dead men steering, dead 
men spreading the sails! I thought what a 
strange idea ! And yet I have lived to see that. 
I have gone into churches where there was a 
dead man in the pulpit, a dead man reading 
the notices, a dead man rendering the solos, a 
dead man taking the collection, and the pews 
were filled with the dead." And Spurgeon has 
spoken no exceptional experience. What an 
appeal for the necessity of the Perennial Ee- 
vival ! 

There are other arguments concerning this 
necessity that are eloquent enough. The steady 
decrease in the accessions to the great denomi- 
nations in proportion to their numbers which 
has characterized recent years; the cry for re- 
trenchment that has smitten the very souls of 
missionary secretaries and treasurers, the com- 
promise with worldliness by which the ambi- 
tious have hoped to keep up appearances and 
increase the local church exchequer, the intro- 
duction of sensationalism into the pulpit, the 
parading of so-called new theology in baiting 



NEED OF A PERENNIAL REVIVAL 21 

for Athenians, the turning of men from church 
to lodge, and of women and children from 
sacred meetings to matinees — all these, and 
more, that might be mentioned, emphasize this 
necessity. No orator could do it so well. No 
angel from heaven could affirm it so eloquently. 
To the man who has an ear capable of receiving 
divine messages these things are nothing else 
than the voice of God announcing the great 
need of the church — a genuine revival, and a 
revival that shall be perennial. 

If He cries to us from heaven, "Turn ye, 
turn ye,^^ why should we not confess our help- 
less estate, and yet express our faith in His 
ability to better us by answering back, "Turn 
us, oh God, of our salvation^^? Albert Mid- 
lane felt and voiced this necessity when he 
wrote : 

"Revive thy work, oh Lord, 

Create soul thirst for thee, 
And hungering for the Bread of Life 

Oh may our spirits be." 

THE SOURCE. 

Calling attention to defects is a cruel work 
unless one is able to suggest a remedy and is 
willing to lend his best endeavor toward bring- 
ing it about. If it be conceded that the Peren- 
nial Eevival is the long-needed remedy, the 
question remains, "Whence is it to come ?" The 



22 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

answer to this question is valuable only in pro- 
portion as it is Scriptural. The man who seeks 
to solve the problem of successful evangelism 
outside of what the Scriptures say deals in pure 
speculation, deceives himself, and destroys 
others. Turning to the Book for the answers 
to our question, we draw on the source of true 
wisdom. 

Probably no one will dispute the statement 
that the first and second chapters of the book 
of Acts present a sample revival. The earnest 
study of these chapters reveals the source of 
the true revival : 

It originates with the Holy Ghost. 

The promise of the ascended Lord to His 
disciples was this: "Ye shall receive power 
after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you." 
"When the day of Pentecost was fully come" 
Peter explained his own ability and that of 
his brethren by reminding his auditors of JoeFs 
remark: "It shall come to pass in the last 
days, saith the Lord, I will pour out my Spirit 
upon all flesh; and your sons and your 
daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall 
dream dreams, your young men shall see visions. 
And also upon the servants and upon the hand- 
maids in those days will I pour out my Spirit," 
and Peter declared they were experiencing its 
fulfillment. The revival did not originate with 



NEED OF A PERENNIAL REVIVAL 23 

Peter, then; he was only the spokesman. The 
real source was higher yet, namely, in the Holy 
Ghost. 

This very fact often explains the revival, the 
origin of which non-spiritual men can not un- 
derstand. In 1828, in Oswego County, New 
York, a work of grace began on a barren field. 
In mid-summer one hundred and fifty souls 
were saved and added to the country church. 
People were at a loss to account for it. But 
wonder was at an end with the godly when it 
was learned that two old men, living a mile 
apart, had selected a point midway, in a cluster 
of trees, and there at the down-going of the 
sun had met for months to pray for the out- 
pouring of the Spirit of God. Dr. S. P. Smith 
knew why he wrote the words : 

"Spirit of holiness descend, 
Thine ear in kind compassion lend, 

Let us thy mercy see. 
Behold thy wearying churches wait 

With wistful, longing eyes. 
Let us no more lie bereft, 

Oh, bid thy light arise. 
Spirit of Holiness 'tis thine 

To hear our feeble prayer, 
Come, for we wait thy power divine, 

Let us thy mercy share." 

The Holy Ghost works through human agen- 
cies. 



24 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

Peter was the principal in the first Pentecost, 
and from that day the Holy Spirit has com- 
menced every considerable work of grace with 
the more consecrated. Those were wise women 
who prayed for Mr. Moody first and for the 
people afterward. The first night after Father 
Chiniquy was converted he spent the entire 
night in prayer. The next day he preached and 
a thousand souls were saved. Sometime ago 
the author received a letter from an Evangelist 
at work in Colorado. The city was a popular 
resort and famed for its worldliness, and yet 
in the first night of the meeting souls were 
saved. The Evangelist attributed this to the 
fact that one woman in the town had long 
prayed for just such a work, and at the begin- 
ning of these meetings declared her faith that 
the time for God's answer was at hand. 

Several summers ago at a lake resort in 
northern Indiana we had to watch against prai- 
rie fires. One night after our lawn had been 
cleaned and grass and brush burned, we went 
out before retiring and poured water over the 
embers until not a spark was visible, and then 
went off to bed, believing that the fire had been 
utterly extinguished. But, ere the morning, 
the wind had risen and stirred a slumbering 
ember into a rolling flame, which fed itself 
upon the adjacent fuel and threatened the 



NEED OF A PERENNIAL REVIVAL 25 

whole prairie and the woodland near at hand. 
We knew not what stick had the coal that, 
touched by a breath of wind, burst into flame 
and fired the contiguous fuel. It may have 
been a large stick, and quite as likely a small 
one. No matter; the material together, the 
wind at work, a live coal accounted for all. So 
in spiritual things, a spark of love in one heart 
may not excite apparent promise, but when the 
Divine breath blows upon that, others catch the 
fire and a revival often follows which sweeps 
the church, and, going beyond, spreads into the 
dead, dry tinder of sin-slain souls, and con- 
verts them into glorious light. 

Why, then, should one criticise his brethren 
when a revival is lacking, since a question 
should be raised with reference to his own life — 
why is it the Holy Ghost has not done such a 
work in and through me? Concerning the 
church in Laodicea, Christ said, "Behold, I 
stand at the door and knock, and if any man 
hear my voice and open the door I will come in 
unto him and sup with him, and he with me.'' 
Some man, some woman will be door-keeper to 
let the Lord in. Why should not I be that one ? 

The Holy Spirit would gladly enlist all 
saints in this soul-winning service. 

One of the most remarkable things in that 
second chapter of the book of Acts is in the 



26 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

eighth verse; every man heard the Gospel in 
that day in the tongue wherein he was born. 
Peter, then, was not left to work alone. The 
whole company of the disciples must have 
taken part. Jerusalem never saw a greater 
crowd in her streets; her people never heard 
such a sermon as Peter preached; but the most 
marvelous thing, that day, was the personal 
work done. The average church now has a 
larger number of disciples of Jesus than were 
in Jerusalem at that time, and yet not a man 
escaped them. What a suggestion ! Why 
should not laymen receive it ? While your pas- 
tors preach will you not engage to speak to men 
in an intelligible tongue ? Will you not federate 
your forces and take a solemn pledge that the 
unsaved shall not pass from the sanctuary with- 
out a personal appeal? Why should the voice 
of one saved man be silent before such oppor^ 
tunities? Why should God find in His family 
one dumb child? Joseph Parker says: "We 
have heard of the great musical director, who 
was conducting a rehearsal by four thousand 
performers. All manner of instruments were 
being played and all parts of music were being 
sung. In one of the grand choruses, which 
sounded through the vast building like a wind 
from heaven, the keen-eared conductor suddenly 
threw up his baton and exclaimed Tlageolet!' 



NEED OF A PERENNIAL REVIVAL 27 

One of the flageolet players had stopped. Some- 
thing was wanting, therefore, to the complete- 
ness of the performance, and the conductor 
would not go on. Jesus Christ is conducting 
His own music. There is indeed a vast volume 
of resounding harmony rolling up in anthems 
that fill the heavens ; yet if one voice is missing 
He knows it. If the voice of one little child 
has ceased He notices the omission. He can 
not be satisfied with the mightiest billow that 
breaks in thunder around His throne so long as 
the tiniest wavelet falls elsewhere. Flageolet, 
where is thy tribute? Pealing trumpet, He 
waits thy blast. Sweet cymbals, He desires 
your silvery chimes. Mighty organ, unite thy 
many voices in the deepening thunder of the 
Saviour's praise ; and if there be one among us 
who thinks his coarse tones would be out of 
harmony let him know that Jesus revises every 
tribute offered in love, and harmonizes the dis- 
cords of our broken life in the music of His 
own perfection.^' Love Him and bring unto 
Him your best. 

THE RESULTS. 

There is a growing disposition to ask for the 
evidences of revival, and the question is not im- 
pertinent. Revival without apparent results is 
commonly a term without a corresponding fact. 



28 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

Let us make mention of some of the results 
that will surely appear if the word be worthily 
employed. 

First, The refreshing of the saints. 

The Psalmist cried, "Wilt thou not re- 
vive us again that thy people may rejoice in 
thee?" Oh the joy among God^s sons and 
daughters when the times of refreshing are 
really on ! The sweetest singing is done by the 
people of the Perennial Eevival. The most ef- 
fective prayers are poured out in the midst of 
soul- winning ; the most energetic service is ren- 
dered ; the most liberal offerings are made ; the 
most extensive and genuine sympathy with the 
sinful and sorrowing is evidenced then. One 
of the sad things of bleak winter is that the 
birds so seldom sing. In winter the perfume of 
flowers fails, the fruits are more scarce than 
evergreens. But what a transformation comes 
with spring! Then the air is bursting with 
song, laden with perfume. All the earth is 
rich in blossoms — promise of harvest time ; and 
spring is Nature's revival ! But sweeter than 
the songs of birds is the song of the saint ; and 
he does not sing, he cannot sing, except when 
refreshed in soul : 

"In vain we tune our formal songs, 

In vain we strive to rise, 
Hosannahs languish on our tongues, 
And our devotion dies." 



NEED OF A PERENNIAL REVIVAL 29 

On tlie old farm in Kentucky the large lawn 
was filled with evergreens and fruit trees, to- 
gether with a beautiful maple or two. In March 
the song birds were in the cedars, unseen, but 
with music sweet. The new green twigs put- 
ting out were gracious to the smell, and ere the 
month of May was gone, the cherry fruit red- 
dened to ripeness. Songs, sweet savors, and 
luscious fruit! That is what Nature^s revival 
brings! But God's revival of grace fills the 
soul with sweeter strains, and causes it to 
breathe out upon the air a purer breath and 
gives to it a richer fruit ! The happiest man, 
the holiest man, the man most helpful under 
heaven, is that Christian man compassed about 
with the grace of God. No wonder David said : 
"Wilt thou not revive us again that thy people 
may rejoice in thee?" 

When saints are revived sinners are saved. 
Our religious newspapers sometimes report pro- 
tracted meetings as having resulted in great re- 
vival to the church, although no conversions oc- 
curred. That is quite impossible ! When Paul 
and Silas sang the prisoners heard them and 
grew penitent. When a Pentecost came to the 
apostles and disciples the streets of Jerusalem 
were full of penitent sinners inquiring: "Men 
and brethren, what shall we do?" Some time 
ago, when Dr. Alexander Blackburn was pastor 



30 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

at Lafayette, Ind., certain pastors in that state 
were oppressed by the reports of the churches 
and agreed to meet and pray in certain centers 
for a revival of the churches located there. 
When four or five of them came to Lafayette, to 
pray with the pastor, no public announcement 
was made of their coming; no newspaper made 
mention of it ; but during the day about a dozen 
members of the church, scarce knowing why, 
dropped into the chapel to pray, and lo, the 
pastor and his associates were on their knees. 
When night came, without any announcement 
except what these people had made, the chapel 
contained an audience. Afterward they were 
crowded into the main church, and some weeks 
later about a hundred converts had sought the 
Lord and Dr. Blackburn administered such a 
baptismal service as the church had never seen 
before, nor has it seen such a service since. 
When the saints are refreshed sinners are saved. 

Then, also, the church receives accessions. 
The Holy Ghost husbands the results of His 
work. 

It is distressing to report concerning a re- 
vival that a thousand, fifteen hundred, three 
thousand have been converted, when the most 
diligent after-search brings but a bagatelle of 
that number into the church. The time ought to 
pass when men consider as converts those who 



NEED OF A PERENNIAL REVIVAL 31 

have held up their hands "to count." When 
men^s names are written in the Lamb^s book of 
Life they will naturally seek membership with 
the church of which that Lamb is the Head. 
Have we not been impressed with the fact that 
the three thousand converts in Jerusalem were 
"added together," or associated themselves in 
the visible organization? When one says, "I 
am a Christian, but I do not think it necessary 
to be a church member," does he not raise a 
question concerning his regeneration ? Of what 
worth is a secret disciple to the church, or to 
Christ? 

We regard him as having been a wise old 
man, who, falling in with young Allyn as he 
went from Cincinnati to Philadelphia to em- 
bark in business, asked, "Are you a Christian ?" 
"Yes," said Allyn. "Have you any letters of 
commendation?" "Only two." "None others?" 
asked the old man. "Only my church letter." 
"Ah," said the old man, "that is what I wanted 
to hear. Put it into a church as soon as you 
get into the city. I am an old sea captain. I 
have sailed the world around, and I have found 
on reaching ports it was best to tie up to the 
wharf. It has cost me something, but it has 
kept me from going down before the storm." 



THE PEIMITIVE CHURCH AND THE 
PEEEJSTNIAL EEYIVAL. 



CHAPTEE II. 

THE PEIMITIYE CHUECH AND THE 
PEEENNIAL EEVIVAL. 

The Minneapolis Journal has just published 
a somewhat startling report from the pen of a 
St. Paul assayist, who affirms concerning the 
quality of the sand sent to him from Steel, N. 
D., that he found gold in it to the extent of 
$12,400 per ton. This assay purports to have 
come from a well-boring less than a mile south 
of the court house at Steel. The gold-bearing 
stratum was found at a depth of one hundred 
and eight feet, underlying a stratum of white 
pebbles, indicating that it was a deposit of an 
ancient creek bed. The newspaper article an- 
nounces that already a number of lots have 
been bought up in that vicinity, and there are 
those who trust that they have secured for them- 
selves a fortune by the purchase of a few feet 
of this land. The article concludes thus : "The 
very richness of the assay inclines a good many 
to be skeptical as to whether the whole transac- 
tion is straight.^^ And well may men be skep- 
tical concerning such a report. Mining proj- 
ects and miners' publications have despoiled 
not a few speculators. 

35 



36 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

And yet it may be admitted that when a true 
find is made great fortunes are the easy result, 
and the men who, by a better scientific knowl- 
edge, stake out the best claims come away in- 
creased in goods. No pen or tongue can ever do 
justice to the mine of truth in God's Word! 
One of the richest pockets in all its wide extent 
exists in the second chapter of the book of Acts, 
the chapter which records the beginning of the 
Primitive Church. He would be a poor pros- 
pector indeed who could not stake out almost 
anywhere in its text plats of truth covering a 
spiritual fortune of the first order. Take for 
instance the last seven verses; one finds them 
full of suggestions concerning the subject of 
this discourse — "The Primitive Church and the 
Perennial Eevival.^' "They then that received 
His Word were baptized : and there were added 
unto them in that day about three thousand 
souls. And they continued steadfastly in the 
apostles^ teaching and fellowship, in the break- 
ing of bread and the prayers. And fear came 
upon every soul: and many wonders and signs 
were done through the apostles. And all that 
believed were together, and had all things com- 
mon ; and they sold their possessions and goods 
and parted them to all, according as any man 
had need. And day by day, continuing stead- 
fastly with one accord in the temple, and 



THE PRIMITIVE CHURCH 37 

breaking bread at home, they took their food 
with gladness and singleness of heart, praising 
God, and having favor with all the people. And 
the Lord added to them day by day those that 
were saved/^ (A. E. V.) 

Knowing the inexhaustible resources of this 
Scripture we shall attempt to appropriate at 
this time only so much of it as pertains to our 
subject. 

THE ORGANIZATION" WAS DIVINELY ORDAINED. 

Going back to the forty-first verse we dis- 
cover the very beginning of that body which 
has been called "The Church/^ "Then they that 
gladly received His word were baptized, and 
the same day there were added together (as the 
Greek reads) about three thousand souls.'* 
That was the first organized body of baptized 
believers. The literal translation "added to- 
gether" brings out the fact of organization. 

The church then was Christ's organization. 

In the preaching of His Gospel, the selec- 
tion of His apostles, the winning of His first 
disciples, and the gift of the Holy Spirit, He 
had laid the whole foundation for this very in- 
stitution. And when He died on the cross it 
was that this institution might be perfected. 
Hence Paul writes to the Ephesians: "Christ 
also loved the church and gave Himself for it, 



38 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

that He might sanctify and cleanse it with the 
washing of water by the Word, that He might 
present it to Himself a glorious church, not 
having spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but 
that it should be holy and without blemish." 
And of the same Christ the apostle wrote again : 
"He gave some to be apostles, and some 
prophets, and some, evangelists; and some pas- 
tors and teachers, for the perfecting of the 
saints, unto the work of the ministering, unto 
the building up of the body of Christ." In his 
epistle to the Colossians he added: "And He 
is the head of the body — the church." 

These are days in which the churches are 
being much criticised, but men do well to dis- 
tinguish between the churches of Christ's ideal 
and the local organizations that may now wear 
His name. The latter are full of faults; many 
of them misrepresent their Lord; and yet, the 
great underlying thought of the church is 
Christ's thought. The critic of Christ's Church 
decries the Christ Himself. The man or woman 
who says, "I see no need of associating my- 
self with a church," exhibits a poor apprecia- 
tion of the institution of which Paul expressly 
says, "Christ gave Himself"; the institution 
which He purchased by His own blood, planted 
in the earth by His own pierced hands, and 
loves today with all the wealth of His infinite 



THE PRIMITIVE CHURCH 39 

heart! The very relation which Christ sus- 
tained to the apostles and disciples who made 
up this old First Church at Jerusalem makes 
it a sample for all successors, an example to all 
centuries. 

His Spirit determined its fraternity. 

"The Lord added to the church day by day 
those that were saved." It must have seemed to 
the inhabitants of Jerusalem a novel thing, this 
organization of a fraternity which was no re- 
specter of persons. The strangest sight that 
had ever greeted their eyes was that of a learned 
and honored Scribe and a healed leper — ^the 
social outcast — striking hands; that of Joseph 
of Arimathea, the rich man, and John, the 
poverty-stricken fisherman, joining in intimate 
fellowship ; that of Nicodemus, the scholar, and 
Peter, the unlearned, finding each for the other 
fraternity. They could scarce understand it 
all. And in truth there is but one explanation. 
John Watson, in "The Mind of the Master," 
discloses that explanation : "Jesus realized that 
the tie which binds men together in life is not 
forged in the intellect, but in the heart. . . . 
. He believed it possible to bind men to their 
fellows on the one condition that they were 
first bound fast to Him; He made Himself the 
center of eleven men, each an independent unit ; 
He sent through their hearts the electric flash 



40 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

of His love and they became one. It was an 
experiment on a small scale. It proved a prin- 
ciple that has no limits. Unity is possible 
wherever the current of love runs from Christ's 
heart, through human hearts, and back to 
Christ again.'' 

In the ^^Life of Moody" one writer tells his 
experience in attending what is known as "The 
Moody Church." At the midweek prayer meet- 
ing he heard an unlettered man tell his hap- 
piness in Christ Jesus; he was followed by a 
young man who thanked God that the prayers 
of the people of that church, put up the week 
before in behalf of his sick mother, had pre- 
vailed, and that she had been restored to health. 
No sooner did he resign the floor than a re- 
formed drunkard arose to relate how God had 
saved him from his cups; at once, on his hav- 
ing taken a seat, a beautiful, cultured woman 
testified, with radiant face, to having received 
the gift of the Holy Spirit for service; at the 
dying away of her voice, an ignorant but happy 
colored woman arose with her hallelujahs. The 
writer remarked: "I thought, although it is 
twenty-eight years since Moody was pastor of 
the church, his spirit dominates it still, and 
makes these people of diverse opinions, unequal 
social standing, and great variety of home life 
one." But the writer was mistaken. It was 



THE PRIMITIVE CHURCH 41 

^ot Moody^s spirit that dominated there, but 
Christ^s, whose love cements men and makes 
brethren of all them that share it! 

In a man's home it is his right to choose his 
friends, and it is natural that the choice should 
be made upon a basis of mutual admiration. 
In society the same right obtains. But to in- 
sist upon carrying that principle into the 
Church of Jesus Christ is to depart absolutely 
from the spirit of the primitive institution and 
bring death to the organized body by a fresh 
crucifixion of its Head. E. J. Hardy, in an 
extended article on "Social Ambition," relates 
how a Boston millionaire, who had begun life 
as a poor boy, gave a house-warming on enter- 
ing his new mansion. He did not invite his 
own brother, a poor man. In the course of the 
evening a mutual friend said to the millionaire : 
"I don't see your brother present. I hope he 
is not ill." "No," replied the fortune-favored 
man; "in society we must draw the line some- 
where." Hereupon Hardy comments in severe 
strictures against that social ambition which 
destroys even natural affection. His comment 
is not without good occasion 1 However, has it 
not occurred to us that such a man acts in per- 
fect consonance with the whole constitution of 
worldly society; acts, in fact, in accord with 
)^our conduct and mine in choosing our social 



42 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

friends, and that he is therefore in no respect 
as guilty as he who seeks to carry the same idea 
into the Church of God? In society we are 
privileged to have what friends we will; but 
in the Church of God every man, saved by the 
blood, is made our brother; every woman 
cleansed in its crimson flood becomes our sister ; 
and the relationship is as much superior to that 
which binds the members of a single house as 
God is superior to an earthly father, as grace 
is beyond flesh and blood. Such, at least, is sug- 
gested in this sample — the Primitive Church. 

Descending again into this mine of Scripture 
we discover 

THE CONDITION OF CHURCH MEMBERSHIP. 

"And the Lord added to them day by day 
those that were saved.^^ 

Only the saved were privileged membership 
in the Primitive Church. 

"The Kingdom of God" and the organized 
body of believers called "The Church" are not 
employed in Scripture as interchangeable terms, 
but it is everywhere made evident that the man 
who has not met the condition of membership in 
the former is also without that demanded by 
the latter. Some men seem to think that good 
morals are all that any church has the right to 
demand, but in His conversation with Nico- 
demus Christ declared the only condition of en- 



THE PRIMITIVE CHURCH 43 

trance into His kingdom: "Ye must be born 
again/' Later He makes clear His meaning 
by saying to Nicodemns : "That which is bom 
of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of 
the Spirit is spirit/' Now to be born of the 
flesh makes one a member of an earthly house ; 
but to be a member of the House of God one 
must be begotten of the Holy Ghost. 

Birth, therefore, is fundamental in the fam- 
ily relationship, sanguine or spiritual. One's 
children may be good or bad; they may grow 
up to honor him or bring him to dishonor ; but 
they remain his children, and it can never be 
ordered otherwise; their birth in the flesh set- 
tles that forevermore; and the man or woman 
who is born of the Spirit belongs forever to the 
family of God. Their behavior may be such as 
to disinherit them, and forfeit much of the for- 
tune which their father has kindly provided for 
them, but the family relationship remains un- 
broken. The one question therefore for every 
man who seeks a place in the church is formed 
already by the conduct of this primitive insti- 
tution, "Is he begotten of the Spirit, born 
from above?" It may be profitable to ask 
many other questions. We interrogate men and 
women on their views of doctrine, their ideas 
of church government, their intentions of 
faithful service, their fidelity to the Word, their 



44 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

custom of prayer, their disposition to personal 
work, etc., etc. All of these questions are 
legitimate; all of them are helpful; but all 
of them are asked in vain also unless one can 
answer affirmatively to the questions, "Are you 
saved?"; "Do you belong to the Blood-bought 
throng?"; "Are you conscious of having been 
brought by the grace of God into the company 
of the redeemed?". These points clearly set- 
tled, it remains for one to take only the di- 
vinely appointed steps of public profession — 
baptism and formal reception. 

It is not unusual to meet with a new con- 
vert who is almost wholly ignorant of the Word 
of God, who entertains the crudest ideas of 
what the church is, and for what it stands. 
Yet, if only it is clear that the heart has been 
surrendered, that Christ has come into the life, 
we believe the condition of Church-membership 
is met, and that there is laid upon the organized 
body of believers the obligation of taking this 
weak child and giving it the milk and meat of 
the Word until he shall be strong. What the 
mother is to the infant, what the school is 
to the untutored, what the hospital is to the 
convalescent, that the Church of God must 
be to the Spirit-born in evolving life, impart- 
ing wisdom, and aiding into the perfect strength 
that is in Christ. 



THE PRIMITIVE CHURCH 45 

The truly saved will covet church member- 
ship. 

While of these primitive disciples it is said, 
"The Lord added to them day by day those 
that were saved/^ we are not to suppose a co- 
ercion. The Lord added them not by any out- 
ward force but by the inner craving for fel- 
lowship. "By this ye may know that ye have 
passed from death unto life because ye love 
the brethren.^^ The converts of the twentieth 
century respond to the same test to which those 
of the first were subjected. The little country 
church in which the writer was converted was 
far from a model institution. Though pos- 
sessed of much wealth it paid its pastor a sal- 
ary of $400 per annum; to missions it gave a 
mere pittance ; and, as already suggested in the 
previous chapter^ it never expected a soul to 
be saved out of season. 

Many of the brethren chewed or smoked — 
and some of the sisters did the same; and not 
a few of them regarded it no sin to keep their 
demijohns. The church was also quite often 
disturbed by internal dissensions, and too much 
neighborhood tattling was among its sins; and 
yet when Christ came into his life and heart 
a new-born love for all these brethren was 
found as he listened to them at prayer or joined 
with them in the service of song. He believed 



46 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

them to be God's people, and to him they were 
exceeding precious. In all the blessed years 
which have rolled by since those days, few 
hours have seemed more sweet in the experi- 
ence, or more precious in after-memory, than 
that in which the pastor of the village church 
gave his hand, and, as the writer believes, with 
his heart, welcomed him into the fellowship of 
the organized body, made up of those who had 
their faults, and yet who were doubtless, in 
the mighty majority, God's men and God's 
women. 

Organization divinely ordained, and a mem- 
bership regenerated by the Holy Ghost, makes 
easily possible 

THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL. 

In this Primitive Church accessions occurred 
every day. ^'And the Lord added unto them 
day by day those that were saved." A thou- 
sand pities that the present-day church has so 
far departed from its divinely appointed sam- 
ple! To come into the experience of this 
primitive institution would be to excite the 
suspicions of devout men and women. When, 
some years ago, the Grace Temple Church, Phil- 
adelphia, enjoyed a long period of time where- 
in it received an average of seven accessions 
a week — a soul a day — it became the subject 



THE PRIMITIVE CHURCH 47 

of much comment by press and people and pas- 
tors, not all of which was favorable. This 
work was spoken of as "spasmodic/^ "sensa- 
tional." People called into question the meth- 
ods of its pastor, prophesied its eventual col- 
lapse, etc. Some time ago after relating to a 
friend the experience of the Third Baptist 
Church of Owensboro, Ky., into the member- 
ship of which Dr. Fred Hale had welcomed 
eight hundred and six in three and a half 
years, he remarked, "Well, I don't know, I 
wonder if they are all genuine converts?" Oh 
to have come upon such deadness that even 
good people no longer look for many to be 
saved ! Oh to have fallen upon a period when 
the church that is fruitless half receives our 
commendation and the pastor is put forth on 
many public occasions to deliver addresses on 
"Christian Culture"; while the exceptional in- 
stitution that is fruitful is made the subject 
of our suspicions and of our criticism! Oh, 
to have been inveigled into an attitude that 
opposes the very methods of the institution 
whose members received their education at the 
feet of Jesus, and whose organization was af- 
fected by none other than the Holy Ghost him- 
self. Into that institution three thousand 
went in one day. That the growth was rapid 
after that day is evident from the fact that 



48 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

when they laid hands on some of the apostles 
and put them in hold, it is said, "Howbeit many 
of them which heard the word believed, and 
the number of men was about five thousand." 

It is not long since our Methodist brethren 
appointed a wise and judicious commission to 
investigate the causes of the decline which had 
characterized two successive years. The com- 
mission had occasion, and its findings were 
words of wisdom containing clarion calls to 
greater expectation from the Lord, and greater 
fidelity to Him and His Word! Among the 
Baptist people there are few better correspond- 
ents of the sacred press than Dr. Spaulding, 
of Boston. A little time ago, reporting the 
Salem Association, convening in Boston, he 
said: "We do not give an hour as formerly 
to the reading of the letters from the churches, 
but print a brief digest of them, and put that 
into the hands of all present. The figures as 
reported are not inspiring reading. They do 
not lift up their voice and cry aloud. It would 
be well if they did. A net gain of about thirty- 
four in an association of five thousand five hun- 
dred church members; and if all the church 
rolls were thoroughly revised, the net decrease 
would no doubt run up into the hundreds. 
This is not aggressive Christianity. And the 
fact that other denominations are making like 



THE PRIMITIVE CHURCH 49 

reports is small comfort. The Boston North 
Association, comprising several of our largest 
churches, confesses to a net loss of one hundred 
and thirty for the year/' And then Dr. Spauld- 
ing remarks, ^The best token apparent is the 
deep solicitude felt by the pastors and their 
trusted helpers." Solicitude ! The word is too 
weak. Sorrow, we should feel; bitterness, we 
should know; agony of spirit! Importunate 
prayer should characterize us; better appoint- 
ments should enlist our thought, and such plans 
as The Twentieth Century Evangelistic Com- 
mittee, of New York, have wrought upon; and 
the Presbyterian body, through their evangel- 
istic committee, seem to be executing, should 
engage us until the whole condition is changed, 
and this sample church of the first century 
finds worthy successors in the churches of the 
twentieth century. 

The spirit of conquest was in the church of 
the first century. Why should not the same 
spirit characterize the church of the twentieth 
century? Oh, to witness the hour when the 
local institution — wearing His great name, and 
now paralyzed in its powers, struggling oft 
with the solitary question of how to raise 
enough money, from within and without, by 
means fair and foul, to pay its current expenses 
— comes into a Pentecost, and has added to 



50 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

its membership day by day those that are saved. 

Thompson tells us that at the close of the 
Prussian War of 1866, the triumphant army of 
Prussia came to Berlin for a reception of wel- 
come. As each regiment approached the city 
gate from the Thiergarten it was halted by a 
choir demanding by what right it would enter 
the city. The regiment replied in a song, re- 
citing the battles it had fought, the victories 
it had won. Then came a welcome from the 
choir, ^^Enter into the city." And so the next 
came up reciting its deeds; and another; and 
another, each challenged and welcomed. 

They marched up the Linden between the 
rows of captured cannon, with the banners they 
had borne and the banners they had taken, and 
they saluted the statue of grand old Frederick 
— the creator of Prussia. 

Beloved, when at last we shall come into 
the presence of the Creator of the Universe, 
and of that Christ who died for us, what we 
shall be able to recite by way of victories won 
in His name will depend upon what we did 
yesterday, what we are doing today, and what 
we shall do tomorrow as individuals and as 
churches. God grant us to be faithful that we 
may be fruitful. 



THE APOSTOLIC SPIEIT AND THE 
PERENNIAL REVIVAL. 



CHAPTEE III. 

THE APOSTOLIC SPIEIT AND THE 
PEEENNIAL EEVIVAL. 

It is doubtful whether there is a better way 
of discovering the secret of success in the Prim-; 
itive Church than by studying the spirit of one 
of its most efficient apostles. Confessedly 
Paul was the peerless soul-winner of the first 
century, or at most, Peter alone shared with 
him that distinction. There is a sentence in 
one of Paul's epistles which reveals the secret 
of his success, so far, at least, as that success 
depended upon the apostle himself. It reads 
after this manner: "I am become all things 
to all men that I may by all means save some.'' 
These words uncover the springs of the great 
soul-winner's life of labor, and privilege us to 
look into his very heart of hearts to behold the 
controlling passion of an apostle's life. What 
wonder that he never failed to affect a revival. 
A notable and most worthy writer recently 
declared concerning his visit to Athens : ^Taul 
failed here. Some mocked him, but others said, 
'We will hear thee again of this matter,' and 
thereby dismissed him with civility, but with- 
out conviction, and so Paul departed from 

53 



54 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

among them/' But let it be remembered that 
the text does not conclude with Acts 17:33. 
Another verse is added to make the history of 
Paul's work at Athens complete; it reads after 
this manner: "Certain men clave unto him 
and believed, among whom also was Dionysiua 
the Areopagite, and a woman named Damaris, 
and others with them." The great Apostle 
had no part or lot with the man who excuses 
the barren condition of his church on the 
ground of "laboring under difficult circum- 
stances" ; of being "located in a hard field/' etc., 
etc. The Apostle found God's promise, "My 
word shall not return unto me void/' made good 
under all circumstances. And while his suc- 
cess at some points was greater than at others 
he found none, not even the dreary Island of 
Malta, or the prison at Eome, where he could 
not by preaching and personal work win men 
to God. Is it not so now with a man or church 
animated by the spirit of this sentence, "I 
am become all things to all men that I may by 
all means save some" ? 

A SPLENDID ENTHUSIASM. 

This speech indicates enthusiasm. 

It is the language of one whose whole life 
was ablaze with the business of soul-winning. 
Some conservative saints seek to brand their 



THE APOSTOLIC SPIRIT 55 

aggressive fellows with a sort of insanity by 
saying, "Oh, they are enthusiasts!*^ It is, in 
fact, a compliment akin to that paid to the 
early believers when, at Antioch, they were first 
called "Christians/* The derivation of the 
word "enthusiast" is "God-inspired** and he 
is honored indeed who can wear that name well. 
It took an enthusiast to be an apostle of the 
first Christian conquests — they charged that 
great Apostle himself with madness. Enthu- 
siasm saved Florence from the spiritual death 
and political oppression of the Medici sover- 
eignty. But men believed Savonarola half in- 
sane. Martin Luther was an enthusiast or he 
never could have wrought a reformation 
against a prostitute and priest-ridden church. 
But for Wendell Phillips — the agitator, the en- 
thusiast — the black blot of American slavery 
might still be staining our south land. Christ 
was the greatest enthusiast of the centuries and 
slow folks thought Him beside himself. The 
pity of the present is that so few Christians, 
and even fewer churches, are ever chargeable 
with this spirit. Dr. Strong in "The New Era'* 
declared that in 1891 it took on an average 
fourteen Christians in a large and influential 
denomination a whole year to win one soul 
to Christ; in another it took seventeen; and 
in a third, twenty-two were required for this 



56 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

conquest. Surely these denominations are so 
well balanced, so sanely sane, that they have 
felt little need of the spirit which indwelt the 
great Apostle Paul! They have mocked that 
which he made the motto of his life, and all 
men know the result. 

THE ESSENTIAL WORK. 

Again, this sentence emphasizes soul-saving 
as his essential work. 

Other things are important; this thing is 
absolutely necessary ! It is important that men 
be fed; it is important that women and chil- 
dren be clothed; it is important that the sani- 
tary condition of homes be studied and im- 
proved; it is important that sociological re- 
forms be effected; it is important that free 
education be provided and its value properly 
impressed. But the indispensable thing is that 
the soul be saved. Lazarus died hungry, but 
the life of Lazarus was an eminent success. 
Tom Lee was educated in an English Univer- 
sity, but, with a soul enslaved, he was fore- 
doomed. Eobert G. Ingersoll was brought up 
in good society and accorded the best advan- 
tages of the nineteenth century, but these could 
not save him from profanity, tippling, and in* 
fidelity of mind and morals. 

When life is over and we come into the pres- 
ence of God one may be a Gladstone for intel- 



THE APOSTOLIC SPIRIT 57 

leet; another a Spurgeon for eloquence; a 
third, a Eockefeller for wealth; a fourth, a 
Stanley for explorations ; a fifth, a Newton for 
mathematics; a sixth, a Bacon for philosophy; 
a seventh, a Milton for poetry; an eighth, a 
Beethoven for harmony ; a ninth, a Michael An- 
gelo for art ; a tenth, a Wesley for organization ; 
but if he has neglected the Master's commis- 
sion, he will stand a pitiable pauper in spirit, 
while the humblest soul-winner will be honored 
with a crown, set with stars destined to shine 
forever and ever, because he did the essential 
thing and illustrated the spirit of the Apostle 
in being willing to become all things to all 
men that by all means he might save some. 

PROGRESSIVE METHODS. 

Paul also provides for progressive methods. 

"All things to all men that I may by all 
means save some.'' That spirit keeps the dis- 
ciples of Christ forever up to date. It war- 
rants a conscientious accommodation. Paul 
was not a politician, a wire-puller; but he was 
a statesman, a wise general. He left unused 
no lawful means to bring the Gospel to men, 
and men to God. To a Jew he was as a Jew; 
to the Gentile, as a Gentile; to the weak he 
became as weak, that he might gain the weak; 
he rejoiced with those who did rejoice and wept 



58 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

with them that wept. The man who can not 
fit himself into the century of which he is a 
part is a poor representative of the Christ of 
all centuries. Accommodation to the times 
does not involve a compromise with the Devil. 
When Jesus Christ was in the world he was 
separate from sinners in His conduct^, but He 
went everywhere under His commission. He 
mingled with the common people; He dined 
with the rich; He visited with the poor; He 
was often a guest in the house with noble Laz- 
arus and spiritual Mary; and they truthfully 
said of Him on one occasion, "He has gone to 
be a guest of a man that is a sinner." When 
Mcodemus came to Him he turned teacher; 
when the hungry crowds were about to depart 
from Him he provided bread and fish; when 
He found the synagogues only partially filled 
He took His way to the street and there secured 
a crowd — all things to all men that He might 
by all means save some. 

You can not go to every soul after the same 
manner; you can not bring all men into one 
place that they may there be converted; 
neither can you reach all men with the same 
sermon nor see them surrender after the same 
fashion. Paul must have a light beyond the 
brightness of the sun ; Peter needs only to hear 
about the man of Nazareth to be brought to 



THE APOSTOLIC SPIRIT 59 

Him; while Lydia^s heart opens to the Word 
as the morning receives the light. Since these 
things are so why should we not accommodate 
ourselves to circumstances and compel them to 
aid us in soul-winning? 

It is related of Uncle John Vasser that he 
went to visit a certain man who, seeing him 
coming, retired to the barn and crept into a 
hogshead. Uncle John proceeded to follow; 
got into the hogshead with him and stayed by 
until the man had surrendered. That would 
not be the best method in all instances. God's 
Spirit must have indicated it or Uncle John 
would not have used it there. When Truman 
Osborne wanted to reach DeWitt Talmage he 
visited his father's house, and as he sat by the 
fireside at night, the family all about, he told 
in the tenderest way the parable of the Lost 
Sheep, and the depths of DeWitt's soul were 
broken up, and with full purpose of heart he 
turned to God. All things to all men that we 
may by all means save some. 

The Apostle here records his disinclination 
to be trammeled by 

TIME-HON"ORED CUSTOMS. 

He was never chargeable with cheap sensa- 
tionalism, nor did he think it essential to the 
proprieties to convert himself into a mere copy- 



60 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

ist. The question with him was not, "How 
have others wrought ?"" but *^How can I best 
work?'^ The past should instruct us without 
restraining us. We should draw upon the cus- 
toms of our fathers for what they are worth; 
we should refuse to let those same customs run 
us into ruts. Thomas Dixon says, "Tradition 
was the most constant, the most persistent, the 
most dogged, the most utterly devilish opposi- 
tion the Master encountered. It openly at- 
tacked Him on every hand and silently re- 
pulsed His teaching. Even the Samaritan 
woman he finds armed with the ancestral blud- 
geon, ^Art thou greater than our Father Jacob ? 
Our fathers worshiped in this mountain.^ '^ 

It was His departure from customs, in search 
of souls, that caused Christ to be crucified, and 
the same fact caused the great Apostle Paul 
to be imprisoned. But without it there could 
have been no Christian church, no soul-winning 
endeavor worthy the name. To a certain ex- 
tent the same is true today. The great soul- 
winners of the past have shaken off the shackles 
of over-conservatism in methods. Witness 
Luther, Melancthon, Wesley, Edwards, Phin- 
ney. This assertion may also be made of re- 
cent soul-winners — living and dead. There is 
a sense in which every successful man is an 
iconoclast. The church itself grows by icono- 



THE APOSTOLIC SPIRIT 61 

clasm ; its first work was to set aside false gods ; 
its permanent work is to set aside false ideals 
and render valueless customs obsolete. Many of 
us remember how we came to our modern music 
of organ and soul-stirring hymns. We saw 
the more progressive fathers fight this battle 
to a finish and finally bring a majority to vote 
with them; but it was a conflict beside which 
Gettysburg was only a skirmish. 

The men who have advocated the institutional 
church after the order of the Judson Memorial, 
New York; Jersey City Tabernacle, New Jer- 
sey; Euggles Street, Boston; the Fourth Con- 
gregational, Hartford, and others equally wor- 
thy to be named, found it difficult enough to 
effect a change in the customs which had ob- 
tained for decades; while that better institu- 
tional church represented by the Clarendon 
Street, Boston, the Chicago Avenue, Chicago, 
Simpson^s Tabernacle, New York, and such as 
have emphasized the importance of Bible teach- 
ing, instruction in missions, preparation for 
personal work, and the better filling of the 
professions of Evangelist and Pastor, have ac- 
complished the same while listening to the 
execrations of those who felt called upon tq 
champion the time-honored custom of four 
meetings a week — two for preaching, one for 
Sunday School, and one for prayer-meeting; 



62 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

and who, as Ernest Gordon has put it, "Ac- 
cept nothing unless hammered on their own 
anvil/* 

When Dr. Gordon opened the Bible Training 
School in Clarendon Street Church the denom- 
inational editor opened upon him a fusillade. 
Now that this honored Pastor and the self- 
appointed Press-Pope both sleep in the dust, 
the former is remembered for having been emi- 
nently successful in soul-winning and saint- 
culture; while the criticisms of the latter are 
written in The Books of Mistakes, of the mak- 
ing of which there is no end. When the Salva- 
tion Army first appeared in the streets of our 
cities the policemen ran them in and the public 
applauded — and that public had its quota of 
custom-made church members. When the Sal- 
vation Army appears upon the streets now the 
policeman keeps order for it, and the public 
attends to its words and tosses it pennies, 
nickels, and in some instances dimes and dol- 
lars, because we have discovered that their 
method is in accord with the apostolic motive, 
"all things to all men that we may by all 
means save some.^' 

There is a page in one of Louis Albert 
Banks^ books which all pastors troubled with 
empty pews ought to study. It reads after this 
manner: "Last April I went to a charge that 



THE APOSTOLIC SPIRIT 63 

has been under most excellent pastors for many 
years, and still, notwithstanding all that, the 
church was comparatively empty of people, and 
on Sunday night less than a hundred people 
attended service, though the church seats about 
nine hundred. I was appointed in the middle 
of the week. Easter Sunday was the next Sun- 
day, and there was a Sunday school concert on 
the Sunday night; and Sunday morning was 
the start-off, so that I had eight or ten days 
to look around. I had some large cards print- 
ed, announcing that I would preach a series of 
sermons to young men on Samson. There was 
nothing sensational about that. I took the 
cards with me. The church stands in the midst 
of a boarding-house population, right back of 
the old State House on Beacon Hill, and all 
the mansions in that neighborhood have been 
given up to a boarding-house population; and 
yet in the midst of all this the church was 
comparatively empty. I set to work myself. 
It was undignified for a city pastor, of course, 
but on Monday I deliberately took a package 
of those big cards under my arm and went to 
door after door of those boarding-houses, and 
when the girl came to the door, I said I would 
like to see the landlady. She would look at 
the cards under my arm, and then at my stove- 
pipe hat, and in that perplexity she usually 



64 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

called the landlady. She came down, and I 
was invited into the parlor with her, and I 
sat down and talked. I told her about the 
conditions of the boarding-houses on that hill; 
said I did not know what her convictions were, 
but I was satisfied she believed it would be 
better for these young men and women to go 
to church. With one or two exceptions the 
.women were in sympathy with it in a minute, 
and would talk with me with the utmost sym- 
pathy about it; and the result was, that after 
four days^ hard work, six or eight hours a day, 
there were a hundred and fifty boarding-houses 
and restaurants on that hill that had my cards 
hanging in their dining-rooms or halls, where 
the people going up to get their meals could 
see them. I said I was going to preach six ser- 
mons on Samson, and the result was that the 
next Sunday evening not less than eight hun- 
dred people were in that church.^^ Our churches 
sorely need more non-conformist pastors. 

We maintain that after all is said on forfeit- 
ing ministerial dignity that "the uppish" may 
utter, it remains more undignified to deliver 
polished discourses to empty pews than to 
search boarding-houses for an audience, or 
carry a dry-goods box to a street corner where 
one can call a crowd. "All things to all men 
that we may by all means save some." 



THE APOSTOLIC SPIRIT 65 

Finally, let us see in this sentence the Apos- 
tle's great 

LOVE OF SOULS. 

When Jesus stood at the grave of Lazarus 
and wept, it was said, "Behold, how He loved 
him/' When one reads Eomans 9 :l-3, he is 
warranted in saying of Paul, "Behold, how he 
loved the Israelites/' When he reads Eomans 
1:14-15, he knows that like His Master this 
Apostle is no respecter of persons, but loves 
Greek and Barbarian, Jew and Gentile. He 
never looked upon the crowds but, with his 
Master, he was moved with compassion, seeing 
that they were as sheep without a shepherd. 
The sight of their need and the knowledge of 
their sorrows compelled him to cry, "Woe is 
me if I preach not the Gospel." 

A man who is out for election to office may 
feign affection for every man he meets, but 
his smiles, his hand-shakings, and fawning pat- 
ronage all indicate selfishness. A teacher 
asked her children, "Who loves everybody?" 
One bright boy replied, "My pa does, 'cause he 
is runnin' for office." But such love never sur- 
vives many months. That may be the occasion 
of making the political campaign season short. 
The man who loves his fellows as Christ loves 
them, as this great Christian Apostle loved 
them, will seek them not only in all ways but 



66 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

at all times. You may send the elite of Lon- 
don to answer the pitiful cry of the East End, 
but after a few weeks the unregenerate among 
them will have tired and returned home. But 
the saved, constrained by the love of Christ, 
will remain. 

It is a psychological and Christological study 
to see the efforts at reclaiming Chicago from 
sin. Every now and then a great organization 
undertakes to clean up its plague-spot — the 
Black Hole — as it is called. But when they 
have grown discouraged and dispersed, Harry 
Monroe, and the class of men he represents, are 
pushing the old plan of redemption with new 
ardor and studying new methods for the sake 
of larger success. The Pauline method, "all 
things to all men," with the Pauline purpose, 
"if by all means we may save some,'^ express 
the Pauline grace, concerning which the Apostle 
wrote: "If I speak with the tongues of men 
and of angels, but have not love, I am become 
sounding brass, or a clanging cymbal. And if 
I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mys- 
teries and all knowledge; and if I have all 
faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not 
love, I am nothing. And if I bestow all my 
goods to feed the poor, and if I give my body 
to be burned, but have not love, it profiteth me 
nothing. Love suffereth long, and is kind; 



THE APOSTOLIC SPIRIT 67 

love envieth not ; love vaunteth not itself, is not 
puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly, 
seeketh not its own, is not provoked, taketh 
not account of evil; rejoiceth not in unright- 
eousness, but rejoiceth with the truth; beareth 
all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, 
endureth all things. Love never faileth. . . . 
Follow after love/' 

When the individual is possessed of this 
grace his personal endeavor at soul-winning 
will succeed ; and when a church of Jesus Christ 
is characterized by it a perennial revival is its 
experience. 



THE PLACE OF PEAYER IN THE 
PERENNIAL REVIVAL. 



i 



CHAPTEE IV. 

THE PLACE OF PRAYER IN THE PER- 
ENNIAL REVIVAL. 

This subject is the most important one to 
appear in the pages of this volume. The very 
sacredness of the theme of prayer makes one 
afraid to attempt its presentation; and yet, 
the urgent need of thought and instruction 
concerning it is so great that one fears still 
more to be silent regarding it. 

It is a topic of which Jesus talked much ; and 
an exercise which He practiced more. If one 
collated the words of Jesus he would find Him 
insisting that prayer is a duty. "Watch and 
pray that ye enter not into temptation"; His 
promise to prayer is most precious : "All things 
whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye 
shall receive." Concerning the prayer of the 
righteous He said, "Now we know that God 
heareth not sinners, but if any man be a 
worshiper of God, and doeth His will, him He 
heareth." He asserts the need of forgiveness 
when praying; "When ye stand praying, for- 
give, if ye have ought against any: that your 
Father also which is in heaven may forgive 

your trespasses." He emphasizes importunity 

71 



72 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

in prayer by reciting that familiar parable of 
the Judge who "feared not God, neither regard- 
ed mam/' but who was compelled to answer the 
widow^s petition because she wearied him, mak- 
ing it an illustration of His statement, "Men 
ought always to pray and not to faint." He 
taught concerning secret prayer: "Enter into 
thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door 
pray to thy Father which is in secret ; and thy 
Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee 
openly." He protested against "vain repeti- 
tion" in prayer; He formulated the model 
prayer, known to this day by His name; He 
expressed the sweeping promises, "Ask and it 
shall be given you" ; "If two of you shall agree 
on earth as touching anything that they shall 
ask, it shall be done for them of my Father 
which is in heaven" ; "Whatsoever ye shall ask, 
in My name, that will I do that the Father may 
be glorified in the Son ; if ye shall ask anything 
in my name I will do it." 

But, as we suggested. His instruction upon 
this subject was exceeded by His practice. He 
prayed for Peter that his faith might not fail; 
He prayed for His disciples that they might be 
one, as He and His Father were one; He 
prayed that they might be kept from the evil 
in the world; He prayed for the descent of 
the Holy Ghost that His people might be em- 



THE PLACE OF PRAYER 73 

powered ; He prayed for Himself in the garden 
of Gethsemane, and upon the cross ; He prayed 
for His enemies that they might be forgiven, 
because they knew not what they were doing. 
He prayed for the Church of all centuries. We 
read in the Old Testament that Daniel, at his 
window looking toward Jerusalem, kneeled and 
prayed morning, noon, and night, but, as F. 
B. Meyer said concerning Jesus, ^Terennially 
from His lips pours out a stream of tender sup- 
plication and entreaty." When, therefore, we 
speak to this subject, hoping to admonish self 
while instructing and inspiring others, may the 
Spirit show us the intimate relation between 
prayer and Perennial Eevival. 

There is no verse in Scripture which ade- 
quately compasses this theme. But the first 
and second chapters of the book of Acts splen- 
didly illustrate it. The first chapter records a 
great prayer meeting; the second recites a great 
revival. 

THE PRAYERS OF THE PREACHER. 

In the report of the prayer meeting in the 
upper chamber, where the disciples were abid- 
ing steadfastly in prayer, Peter is the first 
mentioned. That fact is significant. Inspired 
Scripture reveals the mind of the Spirit. The 
first man mentioned is the one who shall shortly 
stand forth as God^s spokesman — God's minis- 



74 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

ter of the Gospel of His Son. The prayers of 
that meeting have a three-fold significance for 
Peter the Preacher. 

Firsts in the preparation of self. No one 
should read the outline of Peter's sermon as 
it is recorded in Acts 2 :14 without connecting 
the boldness there evinced with the petition re- 
corded in Acts 1 :14. It is equally evident also 
in the further study of this chapter that there 
were more permanent results from this prayer 
than could appear even at the time of Pente- 
cost. Some days later, on trial before Annas, 
Caiaphas, John, and Alexander, and as many 
as were of the kindred of the High Priest, Pe- 
ter, filled with the Holy Ghost, said unto them, 
etc. The baptism of the Spirit for the Apostle 
found expression when "tongues like as fire'' 
sat upon him; but the secret of its reception 
dates to the meeting in the upper room. Adam- 
son, the biographer for Joseph Parker, is 
authority for the statement that people fre- 
quently asked the great preacher if he pre- 
pared his prayers, to which he replied, "No, I 
prepare myself, not my prayers, which are the 
spontaneous utterances of the heart, as these 
are given by the Holy Ghost. I do not feel as 
if they were mine, and ofttimes I am re- 
freshed by what passes through my soul and is 
uttered by my lips." 



THE PLACE OF PRAYER 75 

It is a significant fact that when Paul was 
converted he did not first turn to preaching. 
"The Lord said, Ananias, arise, and go to the 
street which is called Straight, and enquire at 
the house of Judas for one named Saul, a man 
of Tarsus; for, behold he prayeth." "Born 
of the stock of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, 
a Hebrew of the Hebrews; as touching the 
law, a Pharisee; as touching the righteousness 
which is in the law, blameless" ; brought up at 
the feet of Gamaliel; trained in the forum of 
legal eloquence, he was yet unfit to preach, 
even though converted. The essential prepara- 
tion was lacking until it could be said of him, 
"Behold, he prayeth." All the talk; all the 
planning; all the appointments, and all the 
expense in which we may indulge, hoping to 
effect a perennial revival, will fail unless the 
preachers of the land become prepared for it 
through prayer. 

Second, in the prepumtion of a sermon. Ser- 
monizing is the essential business of every 
preacher. Prof. Phelps wisely says to all such 
as choose this profession: "Preach; let other 
men govern; preach; let other men organize; 
preach ; let other men raise funds and look after 
denominational affairs; preach; let other men 
hunt up heresies and do the theological quib- 
bling ; preach ; let other men ferret out scandal 



76 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

and try clerical delinquents; preach; let other 
men solve the problem of perpetual motion, of 
which church history is full. Then make a 
straight path between your study and pulpit 
on which the grass shall never grow." But the 
man who prepares a sermon worthy to be 
preached does it only, and always, after prayer. 
Charles Spurgeon thinks "those sermons which 
have been prayed over are the most likely to 
convert people.^^ He illustrates by adding, '*I 
rode some time ago with a man who professes 
to work wonderful cures by the acids of a cer- 
tain wood. After he had told me about his 
marvelous remedy I asked him, ^What is there 
in that to effect such cures as you have pro- 
fessed to have wrought?^ 'Oh,' he answered, 
'it is the way I prepare it much more than the 
stuff itself; that is the secret of its curative 
properties. I rub it hard as ever I can for a 
long while, and I have so much vital electricity 
in me that I put my very life into it.' Well, 
well, he was only a quack, yet we may learn a 
lesson even from him, for the way to make ser- 
mons is to work vital electricity into them, put- 
ting your own life and the very life of God into 
them by earnest prayers.'' 

The prayerless man may be an orator, a 
poet, an artist; his utterances may be popular, 
and he may attain unto the so-called first pul- 



THE PLACE OF PRAYER 77 

pit of the land; but he is never a preacher! 
The more godly of his audience will miss the 
anointing, and though they may not know how 
to phrase the lack, they will forever feel it; 
and the total results of his ministry will more 
and more make it evident. If men are ever to 
say truly of any minister of the Gospel, "Be- 
hold, he preacheth,^' God, who watches for 
bended knees, must first have said, ''Behold, 
he prayeth." 

Third, in the proclamation of Scripture. 
There is a difference between the preparation 
of a discourse and its delivery; between mak- 
ing a sermon in the study, and lodging one in 
the hearts and consciences of auditors. If the 
change that came to Peter's character in conse- 
quence of that prayer meeting was unaccount- 
able; if the sermon which he delivered was a 
surprise to those who had looked upon him as 
an unlearned and ignorant man, a still greater 
surprise existed in the manner of his delivery. 
His words glowed, and godless men were 
scorched in their consciences as they listened 
to him. Such a result always bespeaks a se- 
cret. The auditors of Peter and John dis- 
covered it, for we read that, 'Terceiving that 
they were unlearned and ignorant men, they 
marveled and they took knowledge of them that 
they had been with Jesus." How the life of 



78 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

Samuel Rutherford illustrates this thought! 
We are told : "During his ministry at Anwoth 
it was his custom to spend hours at a time in 
a little wood near the manse, seeking, and un- 
doubtedly enjoying, a direct communication 
with Christ. He would pace up and down in 
the exercise of prayer; he would wrestle and 
toil until the heavy veil grew thin, and the per- 
son of his Lord was manifestly before him. 
The consequence was that when he appeared in 
the pulpit on Sundays the people were over- 
awed with the sense of Christ being in the 
preacher. It was Christ^s face they saw beam- 
ing on them in the face of their pastor, and 
his tones thrilled with the power of the voice 
which once spoke on earth as 'never man 
spake^ !" He had learned the secret of preach- 
ing. He had been with Jesus in prayer. And 
in the moment when he stood forth to speak to 
the people, Jesus had made good the promise, 
''^The Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send 
in my name, He shall teach you all things and 
bring to your remembrance all that I said unto 
you.^' 

Some years ago an English paper referred 
to a great sermon which had been preached by 
Bishop Simpson in Memorial Hall, London. 
It seems that for some time the Bishop went 
on in a calm, quiet way; but as he approached 



THE PLACE OF PRAYER 79 

the end of his discourse there was an occasion 
to picture the death of Christ on the cross, as 
that death related itself to the atonement for the 
sins of the world. Increasing in fervor to a 
certain point in the discourse, he suddenly 
stooped, as if laden with an immeasurable bur- 
den, and then, rising to his full height, seemed 
to throw it from him, suiting to the action the 
words, "How far?" "As far as the East is 
distant from the West, so far hath He re- 
moved our transgressions from us." The effect 
was overwhelming. The whole assembly was 
brought suddenly to its feet by the excitement, 
and it was several moments before, one by one, 
they sank back into their seats. A professor 
of elocution present was asked by a friend 
what he thought of the Bishop^s elocution. 
"Elocution!" he replied; "that man doesn't 
want elocution ; he has the Holy Ghost !" Doubt- 
less ! But God has never yet imparted His 
Spirit to a prayerless preacher. Ah, brethren 
of the ministry, when conscious of the great 
need of self-preparation, let us pray. When in 
the preparation of a sermon, let us pray. And 
when we stand forth to proclaim the eternal 
truths of Scripture, let us pray. A perennial 
revival will never come to this country until its 
preachers have betaken themselves to earnest, 
believing, importunate, agonizing prayer. 



80 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

THE PRAYERS OF THE PERSONAL WORKER. 

This second chapter of Acts contains a single 
verse in illustration of the value of personal 
work: "How hear we every man in our lan- 
guage wherein we were born?^' When Par- 
thians, Medes, Elamites, dwellers in Mesopota- 
mia, in Judea and Capadocia, in Pontius and 
Asia, in Phrygia and Pamphylia, in Egypt, in 
the parts o$ Lybya about Cyrene, and sojourn- 
ers from Eome, both Jews and proselytes, Cre- 
tans, and Arabians, heard every man in his own 
tongue the mighty works of God, the Church 
reached the zenith of her personal endeavor; 
and the world witnessed such personal work as 
it has seldom or never since seen. One feels 
led, therefore, to study the record sharply that 
he may discover the mystery of making an 
evangelist of every evangelical. To do that 
would be to realize the wish of Moses : "Would 
God, the Lord^s people were prophets every 
one"; and bring in, instantly, a perennial re- 
vival. It may not be possible to name all the 
elements that entered into this acme of private 
ministry. But, remembering the prayer meet- 
ing which preceded it, is it not fairly certain that 
some things were asked for and received in that 
upper room ? 

The first request would be for enduement. 
In the moment preceding His ascension He had 



THE PLACE OF PRAYER 81 

said, *'Ye shall receive power when the Holy 
Ghost is come upon you. And ye shall be my 
witnesses, both in Jerusalem and in all Judea 
and Samaria, and unto the uttermost parts of 
the earth/^ How natural that they should 
pray for the fulfillment of that promise ! Power 
is the worldlian's lust; it ought to be the 
Christianas cupidity, also. But as certainly as 
the man of flesh lusts for physical, social, in- 
tellectual and political power, so should the 
child of God covet spiritual supremacy, and 
seek it through prayer. Petition seems to sus- 
tain much the same relation to man on the 
one side, and the Holy Ghost on the other, that 
the trolley pole sustains to the car wheel on the 
one side, and the mighty current of electricity 
flowing through the line on the other. It con- 
nects helpless need with Infinite energy. Dr. 
Arthur T. Pierson is scripturally warranted in 
saying : "Prayer not only puts us in touch with 
God, but imparts to us His power. It is the 
touch which brings virtue out of Him. . . . 
We see men of prayer quietly achieving results 
of the most surprising character.'^ What is the 
explanation? Why is it that one's neighbor 
without greater talents, and sometimes with 
little more apparent consecration, seldom goes 
after one of his fellows, but, like Andrew of 
old^ he brings him to Jesus, until the saved, 



82 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

set to his credit, are scores; while another pro- 
fessed follower of Jesus pleads His cause in 
vain? Is it not because the first has learned 
how to claim the promise of the Father, and 
tarry for it until endued with power from on 
high? 

One morning not long since an organist was 
in his place betimes; the organ was there in 
its splendid proportions and appearance; the 
pedals were intact and the stops worked; but 
when the time came for the prelude the fingers 
were on the keys and the pipes were silent. In- 
vestigation proved that the motor was out of 
order. In vain. Beloved, shall we attempt the 
service of God except He breathe into us His 
own Spirit. Therein is the source of power. 

They doubtless prayed for direction. The ten 
days preceding Pentecost was a period which 
prompted such a prayer. They were no longer 
in doubt as to the deity of Jesus, for He was 
risen from the dead, and before their own eyes 
had ascended into heaven. They were no longer 
tempted to apostasy. But, without His pres- 
ence how sore their need to have the Holy 
Spirit come and direct their endeavors ! Was 
He not to be their Guide, their Teacher? Was 
He not to tell them what they should say and 
what they should do ? The marvel of His ad- 
ministration appears when the forces of this 



THE PLACE OF PRAYER 83 

small company are so disposed as to reach every 
man of the multitude visiting their vicinity. 
Unquestionably the same Holy Ghost is to-day 
just as good a Guide, and of His leadership the 
personal worker is in just as sore need. To 
ask His leadership, and then yield one's self 
unreservedly to the same, is to see souls come 
to God. 

But a few days since we read the statement 
of a man who, as he walked down the streets 
of a certain city in Illinois on Sunday after- 
noon, suddenly stopped and said to the Method- 
ist minister at his side; "I think I ought to go 

and see Mr. , for I have had him in mind 

all of to-day and the most of last night. But, 
then," he added, "I don't know why I should 
go. The man seldom comes to church and 
seems perfectly indifferent." A block more 
and he said again : "Somehow I can not get that 
man's face out of my mind. What would you 
do about it?" The minister wisely answered: 
"When God says, ^Go,' it is dangerous to de- 
lay or neglect." Turning about, he was soon 
at the man's door, and entering his house he 
found him in tears, and heard from his lips, 
"Oh, I am so glad you have come. Tell me 
how I may be saved." It was the work of only 
a few minutes, as with Philip teaching the 
Eunuch, and the man was ready for baptism 



84 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

in the name of the Lord. Prayer for the Holy 
Spirit's direction will aid every personal 
worker's contribution to a perennial revival. 

Again, they must have plead for the indi- 
vidual. No man can read the first chapter of 
John, and, remembering that the same men 
who wrought there were at work in the sec- 
ond chapter of Acts, doubt that they had friends 
and relatives for whom they prayed in that 
upper room. And what Christian can call into 
question the efficacy of prayer in inclining men 
to come to Christ? How often you have gone 
to see a man without having prayed for him! 
How seldom you have had any success with 
such an one! How seldom have you gone to 
see a man after having prayed for him earnestly 
and long, to find your visit in vain ! Courtland 
Myers, in his booklet, "The New Evangelism," 
relates having visited a Brooklyn physician in 
the name of Jesus, to be met by the kindly ex- 
pression: "I am glad you have come, because I 
have been waiting for you or some man like you 
to lead me into the light. I have been honestly 
searching for the truth, and was never so anx- 
ious to find it as at this moment. I have been 
skeptical, but I am changing, and I want some 
one to show me the way to Christ and salva- 
tion." Mr. Myers says: "I never saw such 
an open heart nor such an honest seeker. He 



THE PLACE OF PRAYER 85 

found peace and pardon, and, with, his own 
son, whom I afterward led to Christ, he wished 
to be baptized into the membership of the 
church. He had heard me preach occasionally 
for years, but I was too far away. Alone in 
that private office was the place of power/' 

But we insist that Myers was mistaken. The 
place of power was where Myers bent the 
knee, and lifted the heart to God, in his home, 
or study, ere he started to this physician's 
office. All power belongeth unto Him; let us 
pray ! 

THE PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE. 

We employ ^^the people" here as synonymous 
with '^the Church." It is our custom to speak 
of the "pulpit" and of "the people," meaning 
by the latter the organized body of baptized 
believers. The record of work wrought in Acts 
2:5-13 was without organization. The disci- 
ples had not yet been "added together"; while 
the report of work in Acts 2:41-47 belongs to 
the credit of the Church. Three thousand souls, 
including disciples who had sat at the feet of 
Jesus and those who had accepted Him in 
answer to Pentecostal preaching, federated their 
forces and began their corporate work. It is 
intensely interesting to study the results there- 
of, and see what many people, who "continue 
steadfastly in prayer," can accomplish. 



86 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

Think first of its effect upon Christian char^ 
acter. The record shows this company to have 
been men and women knowing "the fear of the 
Lord, which is the beginning of wisdom"; 
their apostles working wonders; their whole 
assembly evincing an utter abandon in benevo- 
lence; holding daily meetings in the temple; 
receiving even their very food with gladness 
and singleness of heart, and having favor with 
all the people. Oh, for a season of earnest, 
anxious prayer on the part of God's people con- 
cerning the subject of Christian character! 
The average church can enjoy no revival be- 
cause her membership is of such a motley 
character. The mixed multitude are in it, 
men and women who, by practice at least, re- 
pudiate the doctrine of being born from above, 
and who, with the Johannine disciples at Ephe- 
sus, would be compelled to say, "We have not 
so much as heard whether there be any Holy 
Ghost.'' When the organizers of progressive 
euchre clubs, the chief patrons of the dance, 
the devotees of the theater, the breakers of 
the Sabbath, are in the church in any consider- 
able numbers, a perennial revival is impossible. 
And when men and women, whose sins may not 
so much as be mentioned in better assemblies, 
cloak their conduct under the same member- 
ship, what prospect? To expect a revival in 



THE PLACE OF PRAYER 87 

an assembly made up of saints and sinners is 
to ask God's approval upon iniquitous practices, 
and the prayer is in vain. 

David Brainerd, that godly apostle to the 
Indians, had many occasions of mourning the 
work of his wards. At the forks of the Dela- 
ware he writes: ^^I was greatly oppressed with 
guilt and sham© this morning. . . . About 
9 o'clock I withdrew to the woods for prayer, 
but had not much comfort. Toward night my 
burden, respecting my work among the Indians, 
began to increase much, and was aggravated by 
hearing sundry things that looked very dis- 
couraging; in particular, that they intended 
to meet together next day for an idolatrous 
feast and dance. Then I began to be in an- 
guish. I thought I must, in conscience, go and 
endeavor to break them up. . . . However, 
I withdrew for prayer, hoping for strength 
from above. ... I was in such anguish and 
pleaded with so much earnestness and importu- 
nity that when I rose from my knees I felt ex- 
tremely weak and overcome. I could scarcely 
walk straight. My joints were loosened. The 
sweat ran down my face and body, and nature 
seemed as if it would dissolve. So far as I 
could judge I was wholly free from selfish ends 
in my fervent supplications for the poor In- 
dians. I knew they were met together to wor- 



88 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

ship devils and not God. And this made me 
cry earnestly that God would now appear and 
help me in my attempts to break up this idola- 
trous meeting/^ That is the prayer for God's 
people to make now. These Indians have their 
successors in every assembly — men and women 
who walk disorderly, who work iniquity, who 
are to the church as Achan was to the camp. 
Their regeneration, or reform, is essential to the 
coming of a revival. 

Somehow or other the situation in the 
churches of our section has evinced enough of 
this to teach some of the saints of God the 
meaning of PauFs words: "I say the truth in 
Christ, I lie not, my conscience bearing wit- 
ness with me in the Holy Ghost, that I have 
great sorrow and unceasing pain in my heart. 
For I could wish that I myself were anathema 
from Christ for my brethren's sake." 

But this agony must increase with those who 
feel it, and extend to multitudes who, as yet, 
have not given it sufficient consideration, before 
God's answer can come, and the character of 
church membership be so transformed as to 
clear the way for a perennial revival. 

Think again of its effect in making converts 
to Christ. That is a glorious report: "And 
the Lord added to them day by day those 
that were saved." The Church desires the 



THE PLACE OF PRAYER 89 

return of such a revival. Then, as the people 
thereof, we must pray. The conditions of an 
open heaven have not changed much in many- 
centuries. When Solomon had uttered his 
prayer at the dedication of the temple, the 
Lord appeared by night and said unto him : "I 
have heard thy prayer and have chosen this 
place for myself for an house of sacrifice. If 
I shut up heaven that there be no rain; or if 
I command the locusts to devour the land; or 
if I send pestilence among my people; if my 
people, which are called by my name, shall 
humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, 
and turn from their wicked ways, then will I 
hear from heaven and will forgive their sins, 
and will heal their land." 

Charles Spurgeon affirmed the fact that soul- 
winning in his great Tabernacle was easy, be- 
cause there was an earnest spirit of prayer among 
the people, and because so many of them were 
on the watch for souls. He only declared that 
which is known to be true in every temple 
where men turn to God in considerable num- 
bers. Dr. Elmore Harris assigned the success 
in soul-winning which characterized his pas- 
torate in Walmer road to a church whose mem- 
bers were priests unto God. A. C. Dixon, a 
man mightily blessed of God in soul-winning, 
recently related, at Winona Lake Assembly, the 



90 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

story of having gone to a country school-house 
on a rainy afternoon to speak to seven men. At 
the close of the service two of them earnestly 
sought salvation. He consented to preach at 
night. The meetings were continued three or 
four weeks, and about seventy-five were saved. 
It seemed to Dixon, at first, a case of Eternal 
Sovereignty, in which the Lord had just come 
and done the work without requiring petition. 
But he shortly learned that a school teacher, 
residing sixty miles away on the coast, had 
dismissed her school a half hour earlier that 
she might have more time to spend, upon her 
knees, in pleading for this very neighborhood. 
Given many such petitioners in a church and 
who could count the converts? Given many 
such petitioners in a church and who does not 
know that a perennial revival will result ? 

Finally, think again of the effect of such 
prayers on church extension. Trace the men 
and women of that upper room meeting ! They 
went everywhere preaching the Word and wit- 
nessing salvation. Travel the country over and 
you will find that every church, knowing how 
to pray so as to enjoy a perennial revival, 
adopts the watchword of the Student Volunteer 
movement, "The Evangelization of the World 
in This Generation.^' These churches may not 
all work along the same lines. When the 



THE PLACE OF PRAYER 91 

Clarendon Street, under Gordon, kept the 
waters of its pool busy with baptisms, it poured 
its men and money into India, China, Japan, 
Africa, and the Isles. The Chicago Avenue, 
or Moody, Church has not played so conspicu- 
ous a part in foreign missions, but has been 
more successful in the whole cause of church 
extension. By multiplied meetings, by the 
training of young men and women for success- 
ful Christian service, by the establishment of 
a Bible School, by emphasis upon Evangelism, 
this institution has sent its waves of influence 
to the Atlantic and to the Pacific seaboards, 
through Canada and Mexico ; and by its direct 
agents has taken to the Old World both of its 
peerless revivals of the nineteenth and twentieth 
centuries, the former under Moody, and the 
latter under Torrey. There are people who 
3eera to get a surfeit of pleasure out of the sta- 
tistics which show that since Carey baptized his 
first convert the march of missions had been 
unimpeded, until now the converts from 
heathenism approach two million church mem- 
bers. And there are those who, in order to 
encourage themselves still further, compare the 
growth of the churches in a specific country 
with the increase in population, showing a per- 
centage in favor of Christ and His cause. But 
after all juggling with figures is finished, it 



92 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

remains a fact that on the basis of past progress 
the whole world could never be brought to 
Christ. 

Fellow workmen ! Are not God's promises 
big with a better prospect ? Let us go upon our 
knees and claim them by the prayer of faith, 
and offer ourselves to the Son of God for such 
service as would mean ^^The Evangelization of 
the World in This Generation," and the bring- 
ing back of the KING. 



THE ENDUEMENT OF POWEE AND 
THE PEEENNIAL EEYIVAL. 



CHAPTEE V. 

THE ENDUEMENT OF POWER AND 
THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL. 

We have visited in a family where every 
child in the house was afflicted, severely 
afflicted. The parents, beautiful people, bore 
their affliction with the greatest patience and 
fortitude. And yet, beneath the outward se- 
renity there must have been a continual sor- 
row, which, like the sorrow of Miriam, in 
Marble Faun, was unseen but always flowing 
on. The mother in this home said, "I have not 
lost my faith that my children will yet be made 
whole.^^ 

One other family with which we are ac- 
quainted is far more afflicted; and, strange to 
say, this is the family of God. Deafness, 
dumbness, and paralysis of powers is the ex- 
perience of not a few in the so-called house- 
hold of faith. God, who is our Father, and 
God, who is our Mother, must look down upon 
His own children incited always by the hope 
that they will all yet be made whole. This is 
the promise of the resurrection; but willing 
ones need not wait that supernal hour. When 
Jesus said to the impotent man, "Wilt thou be 

95 



96 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

made whole ?^^ He proposed for him a present 
work of grace; and according to the testament 
of God, power is the privilege of His saints 
here and now. The last words Jesus uttered 
before His ascension, words that were upon His 
lips when His feet were lifted from the ground, 
were these : "Ye shall receive power, after that 
the Holy Ghost is come upon you : and ye shall 
be witnesses unto me, both in Jerusalem and 
in all Judea, and in Samaria, and unto the 
uttermost parts of theearth/^ (Acts 1:8.) An- 
drew Murray once declared: "The one thing 
needful for the Church of Christ, and for every 
member of it, is to be filled with the spirit of 
Christ. Christianity is nothing except as it is 
a ministration of the Spirit ; preaching is noth- 
ing except as it is a demonstration of the 
Spirit; holiness is nothing except as it is the 
fruit of the Spirit.^^ He might have added; 
"Life, even the life that is from above, is truly 
blessed only when enlarged by the gift of the 
Holy Ghost.^^ 

The last words of Jesus look to this endue- 
ment, and in those words there are some note- 
worthy suggestions. 

THE PERSON OF POWER. 

The Holy Ghost is the Person of power. 
When Jesus employed the language, "After 
that the Holy Ghost is come upon you,^^ He 



THE ENDUEMENT OF POWER 97 

spake of the Third Person in the God-head. 
So long as the Holy G-host is counted "a 
breath," "an influence/' "a mysterious spell," 
"an indefinable energy," just that long will our 
Christians be invalids and our churches weak. 
Our fathers were faithful in teaching justifica- 
tion by faith, regeneration essential to salva- 
tion, obedience better than sacrifice, public pro- 
fession a step to service. For all of that we 
should thank God ; it was all true, all scriptural. 
The men, lettered and unlettered, who laid 
those truths to the heart put us under the 
fullest obligations. But, alas, that these same 
fathers should have said so little of the Holy 
Ghost that their sons begin to preach without 
having discovered that the Spirit is the Third 
Person in the God-head. 

A Doctor of Divinity employs the impersonal 
pronoun in speaking of the Holy Ghost. In 
one of the largest of the ministers' conferences 
in this country a preacher, quite well known, 
referred to the Holy Spirit as "it." Christ 
always spake of "Him." Paul did not write 
to the Romans, "The Spirit itself beareth wit- 
ness with our spirit that we are the children of 
God" — see Revised Version — "The Spirit Him- 
self." 

He is the Person of all power. You may 
have some difficulty to receive that truth upon 



98 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

first statement. You may be disposed to say, 
"The Father has power; and Christ has 
power'' ; but let us never forget that this is the 
age of the Spirit. He represents Christ, and 
He expresses the power of God. When Christ 
was on earth He was "the power of God/' and 
emphatically declared that the works He did 
were none other than the works of the Father 
that dwelt in Him. But when He was ready 
to depart from earth He insisted that greater 
works than these should be done because He 
was going and the Spirit was coming. He 
clearly expressed some of the marvels that 
should evince the ministry of the Spirit. 
"When He is come He will reprove the world 
of sin." The power of conviction is with the 
Holy Ghost. He alone convicts men of sin; 
He only can convert men from sin. To Nico- 
demus Christ said, "Except a man be born of 
water and of the Spirit, he can not enter into 
the kingdom of God." 

He also declared of the Spirit that He should 
be the great Teacher of Truth — "He shall guide 
you into all truth." And it is only as men 
know the truth that they are free. Mr. Spur- 
geon reminds us that when Jesus Christ 
preached there were only a few converts unto 
Him, and assigns as the reason that the Holy 
Spirit was not yet poured out. True, the Mas- 



THE ENDUEMENT OF POWER 99 

ter had the Spirit without measure; but on 
others He had not yet descended. "Eemem- 
ber," adds Spurgeon, "that those few who were 
converted unto Chirst, under His ministry, 
were not converted by Christ, but were convert- 
ed by the Holy Spirit which rested upon 
Him/' 

"Eternal Spirit, we confess, 

And sing the wonders of Thy grace. 
Thy power conveys our blessings down 
From God the Father and the Son." 

The Holy Spirit is pleased to impart His 
power to God's people. It is none other than 
a Satanic suggestion that God is pleased to give 
the Holy Ghost to but few believers — to sample 
saints only. Some good Christian men and 
women speak as if it were presumption to ask 
the Holy Ghost, and expect to be infilled with 
His power. But, as against that sentiment, let us 
remember the blessed words of Jesus, "If ye, 
then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto 
your children, how much more shall your heav- 
enly Father give the Holy Spirit unto them 
that ask Him.'' Fathers will understand how 
freely God grants the enduement for which we 
pray. When fathers find their children in need 
and know that a gift will be for their good, 
how gladly they bestow; and when God finds a 
man or woman really fitted for the infilling of 



L.cFC. 



100 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

the Spirit, He has more pleasure in granting it 
than the best of us ever knew in buying shoes, 
coats, and provisions for our loved little ones. 
Bo you believe it? To doubt it is to deny 
His Word ! God help us to understand that it 
is ours if we will to wear the name that old 
Ignatius assumed. That noble martyr called 
himself ^^Theophorus," or "God-bearer/^ "be- 
cause/' said he^ "I bear about with me the Holy 
Ghost." 

THE PROMISE OP POWER. 

TJie promise of power is definite. "Ye shall 
receive power after that the Holy Ghost is come 
upon you." That promise is made the more 
definite by repetition. In the fourteenth, fif- 
teenth and sixteenth chapters of John this 
promise is uttered in almost every possible 
form, as if Christ were attempting to stimulate 
the disciples to expect and prepare for the in- 
coming Spirit. The blessed day of Pentecost 
evinced the meaning of His words, "I will not 
leave you comfortless; I will pray the Father 
and He will give you another Comforter, even 
the Spirit of Truth." That this unspeakable 
promise was not intended for apostles only is 
evidenced in that when the day came He was 
poured out upon the entire discipleship, and 
afterward on the new converts when they were 
made. 



THE ENDUEMENT OF POWER 101 

This promise was uttered under sacred cir- 
cumstances. The last words of a man are ac- 
cepted by society as having peculiar weight. 
The courts) of justice take the testimony of the 
dying as not to be impugned. The fuller 
promises concerning the gift of the Holy Ghost 
were made after the shadow of the cross lay on 
His path. He knew His hour was nigh. As 
a father, seeing the end near at hand, might 
counsel and comfort his children, so our Sa- 
viour did for His disciples. The greatest point 
of that comfort was expressed in this promise : 
"I will send the Spirit.^^ These were the last 
words of Jesus before ascending up to the right 
hand of God. Who shall question the speech 
of such sacred circumstances ? Whatever we do 
with the philosophies of men, let us hold fast to 
the words of the Eternal One. 

This promise of power is almost an unlimit' 
ed one. There were no select few to whom it 
was to come ; and there was no certain measure 
beyond which it was not to extend. For, after 
all, the gift was that of the Holy Ghost Him- 
self — the unlimited and immeasureable One. 

F. B'. Meyer reminds us that the discovery 
of electricity involves the best illustration yet 
born of the power of the Holy Ghost. He asks, 
"How much of it is in the world, and to what 
parts of the world is it limited ?'' And an- 



102 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

swers, "Immeasureable amount and every part 
of the world knows its presence/' There is as 
much in the world now as there was when first 
the day and night were divorced, and perhaps 
no more. But in modern times many have 
learned about it, and have met its conditions, 
and have utilized it. There is more in every 
little village than it can possibly employ. It 
may start its mills, put up its telegraph lines, 
conduct its street cars, and still not touch that 
wonderful thing we call "electricity." And 
his reply is the argument. "So it is with the 
Holy Spirit. There is as much Holy Spirit 
power in your little church, my brother, as 
there is in the largest tabernacle in the coun- 
try, ^Decause the Holy Ghost Himself is there'; 
and the mistake of your life has been that you 
never learned the law of the Holy Ghost, for 
if you had, the Holy Ghost would have come 
flowing through your life as much as through 
the life of a Peter or a John." What a church 
it would be with one such man in it; not to 
speak of the hundreds that God is just as will- 
ing to give enduement! "Ye shall receive 
power after that the Holy Ghost is come upon 
you." Therein is provision for all life and 
energy needful to all the labors of the church. 
Should we not, therefore, reach up to it, touch- 
ing it with the finger of faith as the trolley 



THE ENDUEMENT OF POWER 103 

touches the wire, and, as the huge cars sweep 
on, so see our churches move forward, im- 
pelled by that resistless energy, the Spirit Him- 
self? John McNeil says, "A Christian man 
came to me once and said, ^I have been seeking 
that very blessing, sir, for over thirty years.' 
'Well, brother,' replied McNeil, 'it is time you 
got it, for all these years during which you 
have been crying "Give ! give ! give V God had 
been saying, ''I have given. Take ! take ! take ! 
Receive ! receive ! receive !" " And God is no 
respecter of persons. Our failure, therefore, 
to be infilled by the Spirit is not God's fault. 

THE PURPOSE OF POWER. 

"And ye shall be witnesses unto me.'' How 
that sentence dismisses much of unscriptural 
sentiment touching the Holy Spirit! It dis- 
poses of the idea that God will give His Spirit 
for the sake of your feelings or mine. There 
are people who pray for the Holy Ghost, hoping 
to receive in response an experience of spiritual 
ecstacy. They want to have the peace that 
passeth understanding, the exhilaration that 
comes of His infilling, and they think of that 
as the all-important thing. Joy is one of the 
fruits of the Spirit. The Holy Ghost man is 
the happy man. That splendid saint, John 
Flavel, speaks of his baptism by the Holy 
Ghost as bringing him "such refreshing tastes 



104 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

of heavenly joy, and such full assurances of 
his interest therein, that he utterly lost sight 
and sense of this world and all the concerns 
thereof/' It is reported also that people found 
him wandering in the streets, asking his neigh- 
bors for his own name and home, while his 
face was so radiant as to make his informants 
afraid. Brainerd speaks of his Divine baptism 
as a "flood of Divine love which casts out fear/' 
And Edwards of his infilling as being "swal- 
lowed up in God/' But all of that is inci- 
dental; the Scriptures never suggest happiness 
as the final purpose of giving the Holy Ghost. 

Neither, indeed, is that purpose one of self- 
ish success. One reason why so many of us 
pray for Him, only to see our petitions un- 
answered, is found just here. He is not to be 
the subject of the convenience of men. Christ 
would never consent to become the temporary, 
or partial. Saviour of any man — a Saviour for 
the hour of temptation only, or from the sa- 
loon, or any single sin. He is our Saviour 
altogether or not our Saviour at all. And the 
Holy Ghost is not subject to the call of the 
selfish. One might desire Him to help in win- 
ning a soul, or in the conduct of a series of 
meetings, but He is no neighbor to be coaxed 
into cooperation at your pleasure, parted from 
when your purpose is accomplished. It is lit- 



THE ENDUEMENT OF POWER 105 

tie less than Simony to want to use the Holy 
Ghost as a politician uses an influential friend 
to accomplish selfish purposes. Christ said, ^^I 
will pray the Father that He may give you 
another Comforter, that He may abide with 
you forever/^ Unless we are willing to live 
with Him in the relation of an inseparable love, 
He will not live with us at all. To illustrate : 
Some years since a pastor wrote to one of our 
religious newspapers, saying: "The Eev. H. W. 
Brown has been aiding me in a meeting for 
ten days. The Holy Spirit has been present in 
power. He remains here another week and 
then he goes to Champaign/' Not so, Beloved ! 
If we propose to have the Holy Spirit with us 
in a series of meetings we must also plan to 
have Him with us forever. Gordon says : "He 
is bestowed only upon those who are ready to 
devote themselves utterly and irrevocably to 
His service." Holy William Grimshaw under- 
stood this; hence his words: "I desire and 
resolve to be wholly and forever Thine, blessed 
God. I most solemnly surrender myself to 
Thee. ... In Thy service I desire and pro- 
pose to spend all my time, desiring Thee to 
teach me to use every moment of it to Thy 
glory and the setting forth of Thy praise." 
From Peter to the last Spirit-filled man such 
a dedication has preceded the Spirit's baptism. 



106 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

Are we ready to make it ? Are we ready to say, 
'Till us, Spirit of God''? Then His' purpose 
will appear, and we shall be witnesses unto 
Him. Dr. Torrey has said, "The baptism with 
the Holy Ghost is an experience always connect- 
ed with testimony or service and has primary 
relation to equipment or gifts for this testi- 
mony or service/' See Acts 1 :5-8, Acts 2 :4-17, 
Acts 19:6, I Cor. 12:4-13. That is the pur- 
pose — that we should save men and serve God. 
When we do the latter we accomplish the for- 
mer. 

POSSESSION OF POWER. 

Already we have indicated some of the con- 
ditions of this enduement of power. But the 
deeply concerned will desire some further 
words upon the subject. It is universally con- 
ceded by students of the Scriptures, and those 
who have had experience of the Spirit's bap- 
tism, that self-surrender is an absolute essen- 
tial. We have heard the story of the two strong- 
holds. Fort Henry on the Tennessee and Fort 
Donaldson on the Cumberland. They were 
held for some time by the Confederates. Gen- 
eral Grant and his army and a fleet of gunboats 
under Commodore Foote proceeded against the 
forts. Fort Henry was captured. Fort Don- 
aldson resisted strongly. After four days of 
fighting the Confederates hoisted the white flag 



THE ENDUEMENT OF POWER 107 

and asked for terms. Then the silent General 
replied, "No terms other than unconditional 
surrender/^ It is in vain for us to fly a flag 
of truce and plead for the infilling of the Spirit 
except we are also ready to surrender. 

Self must be surrendered — the whole self, 
body, soul, and spirit. "Yield ye yourselves 
unto God.'' "Present your bodies a living sac- 
rifice.'' There is a story to the effect that a 
certain monk was disobedient to the laws of 
the monastery and his punishment was to be 
buried alive. He was placed standing in the 
grave, and when the earth was thrown upon 
his feet the Superior said to him, "Are you 
dead yet?" He answered, "No." They shov- 
eled in more, until his limbs were fastened, 
and tlie Superior repeated again the question, 
and the stubborn man answered, "I am not 
dead." They tossed in the dirt until it reached 
his lips and was smothering him, and then he 
cried out to the Superior, "I surrender. My 
will shall be thy will." That surrender was 
victory for him over death and the grave, and 
favor also with the reigning one. Man has no 
such right over his fellow, but God the Father 
has it. Do we not see our way ? Surrender ! 

Again, surrender to serve. Some time since 
a young woman went from a Western Church 
to the East, an invalid. She had been injured 



108 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

in a railroad accident. For a long time she 
was bitter about it and even rebellious. She 
had prayed for physical power and did not be- 
come healed ; she prayed for spiritual peace, but 
none came. Finally she made up her mind to 
serve God to the limit of her ability and leave 
her body and spirit to His disposition. Scarcely 
had she begun on this course when, to her 
sweet surprise, health was suddenly given her, 
and the Holy Ghost came into her heart, and 
her home church had one of its richest bless- 
ings when she came back to it, and with ra- 
diant face told how great things God had done 
for her. Surrender to serve ! 

Let it be understood also that we are to serve 
not as we desire, but as God indicates. We are 
tempted at times to think that if we had been 
better born, better bred, more broadly educated, 
given more excellent opportunities, our suc- 
cess would have been more sure. But what is 
human success when compared to the Spirit^s 
power for service? It makes little difference 
about one's first birth; but much as to whether 
he be born of the Spirit. It makes little dif- 
ference about one's social breeding, but much 
as to his spiritual culture. It makes little dif- 
ference what college or university one attends, 
or at what Gamaliel's feet he sits, but much as 
to whether he is instructed by the Holy Ghost. 



THE ENDUEMENT OF POWER 109 

In a Kentucky college there was a young fel- 
low who was regarded as a poor student. He 
was the subject of many a smile on the part 
of his intellectual superiors; he was a constant 
trial to the patience of his learned professors 
and often he was a chagrin to himself. But 
he was surrendered to God to do whatever God 
said, and wherever he went revivals were in 
his wake. He was able to win more men to 
Christ than the combined Christian faculty 
and two hundred students, though many of the 
latter were candidates for the ministry. Was 
he not the successful man of that school? It 
is twenty-five years now since he left it, and he 
has gone on adding stars to his crown, for God 
is with him. 

Beloved, whatever our privileges in life, what- 
ever our station, whatever our favored circum- 
stances, we might well covet that young man's 
experience. To raise up a generation of those 
who know the Third Person of the Godhead, 
who appropriate the promises of His infilling, 
who appreciate the purpose of His power, who 
possess that enduement — this is to see a per- 
ennial revival. 

"The strong man's strength to toil for Christ, 

The fervent preacher's skill, 
I sometimes wish; but better far 
To be just what God will. 



no THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

No service in itself is small, 

None great, though earth it fill: 

But that is small that seeks its own, 
And great that seeks God's will." 



SIX PIVOTAL POINTS IN THE 
PERENNIAL EEVIVAL. 



CHAPTEE VI. 

SIX PIVOTAL POINTS IN THE PEEEN- 
NIAL EEVIVAL. 

Courtland Myer's booklet, "The New Evan- 
gelism/^ is a much needed emphasis of the 
power of "the personal tonch/^ If, in this vol- 
ume, the relation of the personal worker to 
the Perennial Eevival receives attention in every 
chapter, the importance of the subject justifies 
the multiplied references. It is clear, how- 
ever, that one of the most efficient ways of im- 
pressing any duty is to lend assistance to its 
sane discharge. Such is the purpose of this 
chapter. 

Henry W. Longfellow, when yet in his youth, 
writing his father regarding the choice of a 
profession, remarked: "I am not sure as yet 
for what my talents fit me, but I am deter- 
mined to be eminent in something.^^ To what 
extent that determination effected Longfellow's 
success in life, who can tell ? But perhaps none 
will deny that such an ambition was whole- 
some for the boy and both stimulated and di- 
rected his energies. "Worldly people may have 
ambitions in many directions; the true Chris- 
tian's ambition should find expression in a 

113 



114 . THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

single course : '^He that is wise winneth souls." 
The grand old Dr. Sharp, of Charles Street 
Church, Boston, once said: "I would rather 
have one young man come to my grave and af- 
firm, 'The man who sleeps there arrested me 
in the course of sin and led me to Christ,^ than 
to have the most magnificent obelisk that ever 
marked the place of mortal remains/^ It was 
an ambition worthy a Christian. Many conse- 
crated Christians enjoy it, and ask often, and 
of many: "How can we succeed in soul-win- 
ning ?" 

The answers to this question would not nec- 
essarily be synonymous. No man could give 
an answer to this question which would be re- 
garded as full and final. Our largest hope 
looks only to helpful suggestions. But if ex- 
perience, observation, and Scripture can league 
themselves in teaching certain lessons we be- 
lieve that those to be mentioned in this chapter 
are establishd as worthy the name of funda- 
mentals. 

I. GET G0D''S CONCEPTION' OF THE SCULPS V^ORTH. 

The Scripture voices it : "What shall it profit 
a man if he gain the whole world and lose his 
own soul, or what shall a man give in exchange 
for his soul?^^ The perishable world is not, in 
the mind of God, comparable in value to the 
immortal soul. Christ would never have died 



SIX PIVOTAL POINTS 115 

to redeem the silver and gold, the cattle upon 
a thousand hills, the precious stones on land 
and sea. But no evangelical doubts that Christ 
would have been willing to die to redeem a 
single man — such is God^s estimate of a soul. 

J. Wilbur Chapman relates how some Abys- 
sinians took a British subject, by the name of 
Campbell, prisoner. They carried him to the 
fortress of Magdala and consigned him to a 
dungeon without showing cause for the deed. 
It took six months for G-reat Britain to discover 
this. Then she demanded his instantaneous re- 
lease, but King Theodore haughtily refused. 
In less than ten days ten thousand British sol- 
diers were on shipboard, sailing down the coast 
to a point where they disembarked. They 
then marched seven hundred miles in the burn- 
ing sun into the mountain heights, and unto 
the very dungeon where the prisoner was hid. 
There they gave battle. The gates were torn 
down, the prisoner lifted upon their shoulders 
and borne down the mountain side, and thence 
to the ship. It cost the British government 
twenty-five millions of dollars to release that 
man. Such was the value they put upon the 
life and liberty of one English subject! But 
God puts a greater price upon the life and lib- 
erty of a single soul ! That is why He sum- 
moned all heaven to its redemption, and ap- 



116 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

pointed His Son — chief Captain and Leader — 
to effect its liberty ! When we get God^s con- 
ception of the souFs worth no sacrifice will 
seem too great to make in the effort to save it; 
when we get God's conception of a soul's worth 
no obstacle will seem insurmountable ; when we 
get God's conception of a soul's worth we will 
sacrifice, as did Christ, to reclaim it from sin, 
believing with Solomon, "He that is wise win- 
neth souls." 

11. LET us CONSECRATE OURSELVES TO SOUL- 
WINNING. 

Everyone knows the meaning of consecration 
— "Set apart as sacred ; dedicated to sacred uses, 
and hence separated from common use." Ly- 
man Abbott illustrates by the two cups, made 
at the command of a king, by a jeweler. They 
came of a common piece of silver, and were 
of exact size and weight. One was put into 
the hand of the cupbearer to do service to man ; 
and one was sent to the temple to do service 
to God. The latter was consecrated. Conse- 
cration is one of the secrets of successful soul- 
winning. Dr. Dixon tells us that as one walks 
down the corridor of the Astor House, New 
York, on his way to the restaurant, he sees a 
man standing at the door who never looks at 
your face. His business is to black shoes. He 



SIX PIVOTAL POINTS 117 

is consecrated to it. Consecration is more 
needed in soul-winning than intelligence or ex- 
tensive education. The world^s great Intel-* 
lectual lights have not always been the world's 
greatest religious lights; and its most highly 
educated men are not always its most effective 
Christians. We have splendid genius in the 
Church; we have more than our share of in- 
tellectuality we think that statistics will 
prove, without question, that, as a class, Chris- 
tian men are the world's best educated. But 
all of these things, if their possessors be uncon- 
secrated, count for naught in soul-winning. We 
have known a boy, of medium ability, at work 
with his school-mates, to win more souls be- 
tween the day of his conversion at seven years 
of age and the time we parted company with 
him at twelve, than the average President of 
a Christian college has set to his credit. Henry 
Ward Beecher, the Shakespeare of the Ameri- 
can pulpit, was led to Christ by a man as black 
as midnight, whose genius consisted of one 
thing, and one thing only — he knew God and 
sought the salvation of his fellows. 

Many have read "The Last Pages of an Offi- 
cer's Diary," and recall how that army officer, 
who had but thirty days to live, set about find- 
ing someone to show him the way of salvation. 
In four or five pulpits, representing as many 



118 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

denominations, he heard men who were elo- 
quent enough, but who gave his soul no assist- 
ance in its search after life. When all but a 
few days of the thirty had passed and he was 
growing desperate in his darkness, he rose after 
a restless night, dressed himself, and started 
for the street and stumbled over the old sexton, 
who, in the early morning, sat upon the door- 
step in Bible study. Seeing that the sexton's 
Bible was marked and thumb-worn he clutched 
for it, but the old man held it with a covetous- 
ness such as some men show only for silver 
and gold. When, however, he learned the pur- 
pose of the officer he invited him to a seat at 
his side, and in ten minutes had shown him the 
way of salvation and brought him to the point 
where he could say with Paul, "To live is 
Christ, but to die is gain." Better be a sexton 
of any church at a small salary, knowing how 
to point men to the Lamb of God that taketh 
away the sins of the world, than the most elo- 
quent preacher who ever graced any pulpit, 
without that same knowledge. 

III. SURRENDER TO THE SPIRIT^S COUNSEL. 

^TTield yourselves to Him/' He leads the 
yielded one, and His leadership in this great 
work insures success. It may take one by 
strange ways and other men may question his 



SIX PIVOTAL POINTS 119 

sanity at times; but, after all, the Spirit-led 
man is the only sane man. It was a strange 
thing for Philip to leave the work in Samaria 
and go toward the South into a desert way. 
But it was Spirit-directed, and hence sane. 
No man plays the fool who follows the lead- 
ings of the Holy Spirit even though that take 
him against what he would commonly regard 
his better judgment. Dr. Wayland Hoyt has 
related an experience in illustration of this 
point. When he was pastor in Brooklyn he was 
engaged in special meetings, and among those 
who evinced some interest was a gentleman for 
whom he had often prayed. He noticed his 
attendance one week night and thought he 
ought to speak to him about his soul, but 
through fear refrained. Another night when 
he had returned to his home late, finding him- 
self too nervous to sleep, he was reading in his 
study. As he read, something seemed to whis- 
per in his ear, ^^Go and see that man tonight." 
But the preacher mentally replied, ^^t is after 
twelve o'clock and he is asleep and everyone 
is in bed,'' and read on. But the impression 
remained and grew. He argued, "It is snow- 
ing and I am tired" ; and finally, "I have been 
working hard all day and I don't want to go." 
But all excuses to the contrary, the Spirit per- 
sisted, and at last he yielded and went. As 



120 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

he touched the man's doorbell he thought, 
"What a fool I am to be ringing a man's bell 
at one o'clock in the morning; he will think 
I am insane." But instantly the door opened 
and the man stood there and said, "Come in 
and God bless you. You are the man I have 
been waiting for all night. Wife and children 
and the servants are all asleep, but I could 
not sleep; I felt I must find Jesus tonight.'' 
And the great preacher testified, "It was no 
trouble to show that man the way," for the 
Spirit who had guided him had also gone be- 
fore him. 

Beloved, is it not a mistake to suppose that 
only sample saints can enjoy the guidance of 
the Spirit of God ; that only a few of the world's 
great souls have been selected as the subjects 
of His special favor? Many of us are fathers 
and know the joy of giving good gifts to our 
children ; let us never forget that God has more 
pleasure in giving the Holy Spirit to them that 
ask Him. Let us not go after men until he 
sends us ; let us never refuse when he says "Go," 
for His guidance means good success. 

IV. EMPLOY THE SWORD OF THE SPIRIT. 

It is the divinely appointed instrument of 
salvation. The man who uses it works under 
the promise, "As the rain cometh down from 



SIX PIVOTAL POINTS 121 

heaven, and returneth not thither, hut watereth 
the earth, and maketh it hring forth and bud, 
that it may give seed to the sower, and bread 
to the eater: so shall my word be that goeth 
forth out of my mouth : it shall not return unto 
me void; but it shall accomplish that which I 
please, and it shall prosper in the thing where- 
to I sent it/^ It might be well for us to re- 
member that the promise is to the preached 
word rather than to the person preaching. 
Paul declared, "I am not ashamed of the gospel 
of Christ for it is the power of God unto sal- 
vation to every one that believeth/^ *^The pow- 
er of God unto salvation !'' Truly it is at 
once a divinely appointed and a potent instru- 
ment. ^^The word of God is quick and power- 
ful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, 
piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul 
and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and 
is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of 
the heart/^ Let us use it! 

In preaching the word claim the promise, 
''It shall not return void/^ A friend who was 
somewhat in sympathy with higher criticism 
once asked this question of the writer: 'Tou 
know E — y his manner of life, his mental capa- 
city, and you also know Pastor , one of 

the most beautiful characters in this country, 
possessed also of one of the most brilliant in- 



122 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

tellects. To my knowledge when Pastor 

was yet a young man he prayed God to make 
him a winner of souls, and on Saturday he 
would go into his pulpit, with his face in the 
dust, and beg that next day he might see men 
turn to God in great companies. But nothing 
came of it. He never was a soul-winner; he 
is not a soul-winner now. But E — , both in 
his work in his own church while he was yet 
a pastor, and afterward in various cities about 
the country as an evangelist, saw thousands of 
people profess a faith in Christ as the result 
of his preaching. Now he is not a man of 
any such mental ability, nor of any such high 
moral character as my friend, the pastor men- 
tioned. How explain why God made one a 
winner of souls and refused that privilege to 
the other?" The answer was instant; and as 
we believe correct: "We admit all you say 
concerning these men, but there is one thing 
you forget. The pastor you mention is also 
our friend, and we ardently admire him for 
his moral character and his great brain; but 
never have we heard him so much as make 
mention of the blood of Jesus Christ. The 
heart of the Gospel has been left out of his 
preaching and his sermons have been brilliant 
philosophical discussions, destitute often of even 
a quotation from the Word after he had parted 



SIX PIVOTAL POINTS 123 

company with his text. While our friend E. 
makes much of the Blood and adds Scripture 
to Scripture in his discussion. Let us remem- 
ber that God's promise is to the preaching of 
the Word and not to eloquent utterance.^' 

Whenever a man reaches the point where he 
feels it is as profitable to take a text from 
Shakespeare as from Paul he must expect a 
fruitless ministry. Whenever a personal work- 
er has nothing better than human arguments, 
or even an exceptional experience to rehearse 
before a man under conviction, he need not look 
to see the man come to Christ. It is the Word 
of God that wins from sin to the Saviour ; and 
without it, success in soul-winning is unknown. 
By way of illustration a personal experience. 
It was on a Christmas evening at the Union 
Mission in Minneapolis. Many of the men 
present in that down-town mission were drunk, 
some of them so boisterous that they had to be 
ejected to save the service from confusion. 
When the sermon was finished an opportunity 
was given for prayer. About a dozen men came 
forward, among them one who looked far worse 
than any of his unfortunate fellows. Drink 
had clothed him in rags, bloated his face, and 
dulled his mind. Once at his side we called 
his attention to the promise in John 6:37 : 
All that the Father giveth me shall come to 



124 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

me; and him that cometh to me I will in no 
wise cast out'^; we emphasized it by reading 
it three or four times. Then we urged him 
to read it, which he did. We requested a sec- 
ond reading, a third, a fourth, a fifth, until 
evidently the meaning of the promise was clear- 
ly apprehended. Then, after prayer, we parted 
company. Eight days went by, and in a Sun- 
day-afternoon meeting for men only, where sev- 
eral came out for Christ, this man of the mis- 
sion meeting appeared among them. He was 
sober, clean, clear-eyed; so marvelously im- 
proved in appearance that at first we failed to 
recognize him. When he had made himself 
known we involuntarily remarked: "Mr. Car- 
roll, you look like another man." To which he 
replied: "By the grace of God I am another 
man. I trusted that promise of John 6 :37, 
and He has kept it. I have been sober ever 
since that night with no desire even to use to- 
bacco. I have been able daily to make an 
honest living and now I have a new lease on 
life, or rather a lease on a new life." Up to 
the day when he sickened and died he was a 
most faithful Christian. Employ the sword of 
the Spirit! Mr. Spurgeon's maxim had occa- 
sion. It was this, often addressed to his stu- 
dents : "Have your own Bible and turn to the 
passages showing the way of salvation. The 



SIX PIVOTAL POINTS 125 

most successful soul-winner I know takes men 
captive by the sword of the Spirit/^ Is not 
that what Paul meant when he wrote to Tim- 
othy, "Give diligence to present thyself ap- 
proved unto God, a workman that needeth not 
to be ashamed, handling aright the word of 
truth"? 

V. IN THIS^ THE DIVINEST WOEK^ BE DIRECT. 

Here Christ is our example. No indirectness 
with Him. To the fisherman, "Follow me.*' 
To the publican, "Come after me." To Nico- 
demus, "Ye must be born again." To the 
woman at Sychar, "If thou knewest the gift of 
God and who it is that talketh with thee, thou 
wouldst have asked of Him, and He would have 
given thee living water." There are teachers 
who advise that we adroitly introduce our 
Jesus; that we engage with men upon all the 
subjects in which they are interested, and watch 
for an opportunity to work around to the great 
theme of the soul and its salvation. Seminary 
professors whose memory we revere, great and 
good men of God, taught us after this manner. 
But there is no warrant in the Word. 

Christ's example was also the apostolic meth- 
od. Let us read the first chapter of John and 
see how the early disciples won their associates, 
or the second chapter of Acts, or the fourth, or 



126 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

the eighth, or the ministry of Paul as recorded 
in that same book. Whatever else these apostles 
did, directness in appeal to men characterized 
every one of them who became soul-winners. 
"Andrew findeth his own brother Saul, and 
sayeth unto him, We have found the Messiah, 
which is, being interpreted, the Christ. And 
he brought him to Jesus.'^ There is our sample 
for personal work. No indirectness suggested 
by that process, not by any other Scripture. 
We believe the indisposition to speak to men 
frankly and at once about their souls is sug- 
gested by the Adversary. 

Dr. Wharton once addressed the students of 
the Southern Baptist Seminary. In the course 
of his remarks from the text "Go out into the 
highways and hedges and compel them to come 
in,'' he said : "During the war I was attending 
Eoanoke College at Salem, Va. For several 
days it was reported that General Averill, in 
command of a heavy force, was on a raid 
through Virginia and aiming at Salem to tap 
the Virginia & Tennessee Railroad at that 
point, and thus cut off the supplies coming 
to Lynchburg. One morning the cry was heard, 
^The Yankees are coming ! The Yankees are 
coming!' Looking up the street we saw them 
riding pell-mell into town, horses^ hoofs clat- 
tering, sabers rattling, men shouting, women 



SIX PIVOTAL POINTS 127 

and children flying to their homes, and fear 
and confusion falling upon all. A good num- 
ber of us young fellows took to our heels for 
the woods about half a mile away. When near- 
ly across the field I heard several shrill hiss- 
ing sounds in my immediate vicinity followed 
by sharp reports of firearms. Looking back 
I saw there was a man after me on horseback, 
and he seemed to be shooting at every Jump. 
I reached the fence and fell over it, and laid 
as flat on the ground as a lizard on a log. Pres- 
ently I heard him say, ^Come out of there, sir.^ 
I looked up and he had a great big sharp- 
shooter leveled at me, and the hammer of it 
was saying, ^Be quick or you are gone.^ 'Come 
out,' the fellow said. The end of that pistol 
was as big as a stovepipe. There was only one 
thing to do. 'Yes, sir,' I said, 'I am going to. 
Don't shoot!' and out I came. 'Now,' said 
Dr. Wharton, 'I call that personal work. He 
was after me and he got me.' " Why can not 
we as Christian soldiers be as courageous and 
as direct in our methods that we may capture 
men for Him? 

How much we lose by indirectness, who can 
measure? A pastor in New York City walked 
home with a druggist watching for an oppor- 
tunity to speak to him about his soul, but did 
not find it. Once at his door the druggist 



128 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

urged the pastor to come in. He accepted, 
spent an hour in conversation, but saw no 
chance to speak of Christ. After he had put 
on his overcoat and was ready to leave the 
druggist laid his hand on his shoulder and 
said, "Can't you stay a little longer and pray 
with us? I have been greatly interested for 
my soul and shall never be satisfied until I 
am a saved man/' There are those who have 
been in rebellion against Christ who have grown 
tired of it and long for surrender, and like the 
confederates at Eichmond, will be exceedingly 
glad when the day comes that they are con- 
quered, and peace has been declared between 
them and Him whose right it is to reign. Let 
Philip teach us: "Philip findeth Nathanael, 
and saith unto him, we have found Him of 
whom Moses in the law and the prophets did 
write, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph. 
And Nathanael said imto him, can any good 
thing come out of Nazareth? Philip saith 
unto him. Come and see." Directness in soul- 
winning is after the Divine example and is 
under the Divine benediction. 

VI. WITH WHATEVER SUCCESS BE DISSATISFIED. 

The man who is satisfied in soul-winning is 
stultified in spiritual interest. We remember 
how it is related of the great Danish sculptor. 



SIX PIVOTAL POINTS 129 

Thorwaldsen, that having finished to his own 
satisfaction a piece of work, he sat in gloom 
with a sob in his soul, and declared that, hav- 
ing once realized his ideal, he feared that hence- 
forth he should accomplish nothing. And so 
it proved. The man that is satisfied in soul- 
winning has better occasion for such fear*. 
Paul had seen scores turn to God in consequence 
of his preaching before he ever penned the 
words, "I have great heaviness and continual 
sorrow in my heart. For I could wish that 
myself were accursed from Christ for my breth- 
ren, my kinsmen according to the flesh.^^ 

One may rejoice in the success given; but 
to be satisfied with it would be to grow indiffer- 
ent to the dying about us. At college we had 
a room mate who seemed sad and dispirited. 
One day we turned upon him and asked, '^hy 
are you not more happy? Your father pro- 
vides you all the money you need. You have 
enjoyed good school advantages all your life. 
In person you are attractive and you are pop- 
ular, and yet there is a gloom over your spirit.^^ 
He answered by reciting an experience the par- 
ticulars of which were well known to us. It 
involved the rescue of three persons from drown- 
ing. But while he was about the work three 
others went down to be seen no more until 
the grappling hooks reclaimed the dead. And^, 



130 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

concluding the story, he remarked: ''Never 
since that day have I been entirely happy, be- 
cause the cries of those drowning ones are still 
in my ears/' 

Ah, Beloved, is not one difficulty with the 
present-day evangelism the fact that our ears 
are dead? The cries of the drowning are not 
in them, the men about us are going down 
and we know it, but we are not deeply dis- 
turbed about it! If we were our very distress 
would convert us into soul-winners everyone. 
We have not forgotten Moody's report of his 
first impulse in soul-winning. A young man, 
teaching a class of girls in Moody's Sunday 
school in Chicago sickened with consumption 
and was about to die. He seemed in such dis- 
tress that Moody sought to comfort him by say- 
ing that he had done better with that class 
of girls than any one else. Under the hands 
of others they had seemed incorrigible. But 
he was so weighted down with sorrow that he 
had failed to bring even one of them to Christ 
that Moody hired a carriage and drove the 
young man to the distant homes of every one 
of these girls. According to Moody's report 
he entered each home and said, "I have just 
come to ask you to come to the Saviour." And 
then he prayed as Moody had never heard a 
man pray. For ten days he labored and at 



SIX PIVOTAL POINTS 131 

the end of the ten days everyone of that large 
class had yielded to Christ. When the train 
was moving to take him to the South, they 
stood in the Michigan Southern depot tearful 
at parting from this noble teacher, yet joyful 
in their newly found hope. And as he left 
for that South land, to die there, as it after- 
ward proved, he went having illustrated what 
ten days' work for God can do when one con- 
verts his dissatisfaction into soul-winning; into 
inspiration in service! 



THE EEGULAE CHURCH SERVICES 
AND THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL. 



CHAPTEE YII. 

THE REGULAE CHUECH SEEVICES 
AND THE PEEENNIAL EEVIVAL. 

Unquestionably the forms of church life are 
undergoing radical and far-reaching changes. 
The former custom of two services on Sunday, 
a mid-week prayer meeting, and the Sunday 
Bible School will not suffice for twentieth cen- 
tury methods. This is true, not because the 
twentieth century churches are so much in ad- 
vance of those of the first century, but rather 
because the nineteenth century methods were 
a retrogression from the methods of Christ, 
Peter, and Paul. The members of the earliest 
church, ^^Day by day, continuing steadfastly 
with one accord in the temple, and breaking 
bread at home, took their food with gladness 
and singleness of heart, praising God, and hav- 
ing favor with all the people. And the Lord 
added to them day by day those that were 
saved.^' 

The ideal expressed in that Scripture has 
doubtless given rise to the Institutional Church, 
which, at present, is very popular. If one 
studies this latest evolution of church life he 

will find it expressing itself under two very 

135 



136 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

distinct and altogether different phases. There 
is an institutional church which dotes upon ice 
cream suppers, full dress receptions, popular 
lectures, chess boards, bowling alleys, the social 
settlement, not to speak of the occasional dance 
and amateur theatricals ; and there is the in- 
stitutional church which expresses itself in the 
organization of prayer meetings, mission circles, 
Bible study classes, evangelistic corps, and mul- 
tiplied mission stations. 

It is not difficult for one to see that this 
latter institution repeats the essential features 
of apostolic times and enjoys the essential spirit 
of the apostolic power. A writer describing the 
work of that great church — ^the Philadelphia 
Baptist Temple — says : '^On an average twenty- 
five religious meetings of various kinds were 
held in the Temple weekly. This did not in- 
clude meetings of trustees, or the business meet- 
ings of various societies. There is something 
going on in the Temple all the time. It is a 
church that is never closed.'^ All of this sug- 
gests not only the possibility of the perennial 
revival, but the relation which the regular meet- 
ings of any baptized body of believers should 
sustain to the promotion of the same. 

It is the purpose of this chapter to make 
prominent this relation by three remarks: 
Multiply the Number of such Services; Make 



THE REGULAR CHURCH SERVICES 137 

Them the Mediums of Salvation; and Yield 
Them to the Administration of the Spirit. 

MULTIPLY THE NUMBER OF SUCH SERVICES. 

It is a strange circumstance that men have 
been so slow in recognizing the value of multi- 
plied religious services. When the Holy Ghost 
administered the church her members "Con- 
tinued steadfastly in the apostles' teaching and 
fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and the 
prayers." The Scriptures which recite this 
fact make it clear that meetings in the name 
of the Lord were almost continuous. 

Think of the advantages which would nat- 
urally result from the oft-repeated assembly of 
the saints. 

This would provide for Christian fellowship. 
The new convert would be saved from that lone- 
liness which often follows the turning from 
evil associates, and which Satan has converted 
into a very wilderness-temptation for the new- 
ly baptized. The cordial handshake, the smiles 
of newly made friends, and the response of 
purified hearts are all adapted to the comfort 
and encouragement of the new convert, and are 
almost equally appreciated by those who are 
older in the brotherhood. It was after David, 
the lad, had met and conquered Goliath, the 
enemy of Israel, that Abner brought him before 



138 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

Saul, with the head of the Philistine in his 
hand; and, as he stood that day in the pres- 
ence of the king, Jonathan, the king's son, 
looked upon him, and it is recorded: "When 
he had made an end of speaking nnto Saul, 
that the soul of Jonathan was knit with the 
soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his 
own soul. And Saul took him that day, and 
would let him go no more home to his father's 
house. Then Jonathan and David made a 
covenant, because he loved him as his own soul." 
What a beautiful ensample this of the experi- 
ence into which every man should come the 
moment the great Enemy has been put beneath 
his feet. To him the children of the King's 
House should extend a welcome to heart and 
home. Men little dream the full value of 
friendship. Who will ever imagine the whole 
benediction of Christian fellowship? One of 
the poets expressed the thought that the song 
he had breathed into the air had come back to 
him, long afterward, in the heart of a friend. 
Let every child of God know that the friend- 
ship which he shows to the babes, or older 
brethren in Christ Jesus, will come back to 
him in characters as kingly and natures as 
strong as was David's in the sight of Jonathan. 
Again, the multiplication of such services 
tmds to the establishment of faith. There is 



THE REGULAR CHURCH SERVICES 139 

more than fellowship in the assembly of the 
saints. The saints continued also ^^steadfastly 
in the apostles^ teaching/' Every Christian 
man needs line upon line, precept upon pre-* 
cept. A man may give too little of his time 
to service; he is in no great danger of attend- 
ing too often upon scriptural instruction. 
Harry Monroe's method of establishing in right- 
eousness the men snatched from the social sew- 
ers of Chicago is a meeting every night in the 
week in which song and testimony and prayer 
are coupled with instruction in the Sacred 
Scriptures. He knows that in addition to the 
necessity for fellowship they must be estab- 
lished in the truth. Since they wrestle not 
"against flesh and blood, but against the prin- 
cipalities, against the powers, against the world- 
rulers, of this darkness, against the spiritual 
hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places," 
nothing short of the "whole armor of God'' will 
enable them to stand in that day, "and having 
done all to stand." And if they are to stand, 
their '^oins must be girded with the truth," 
"the breastplate of righteousness" must be put 
on; their feet must be shod with "the prepara- 
tion of the Gospel of peace," the "Shield of 
faith" must be taken of them, the ^Tielmet of 
salvation" and the "sword of the Spirit, which 
is the Word of God." Their success is in "all 



140 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

prayer and supplication, praying at all sea- 
sons in the Spirit, and watching thereunto in 
all perseverance/' Every church, every pastor, 
every evangelist should be as solicitous for new 
converts that they should not be "tossed to and 
fro and carried about with every wind of doc- 
trine, by the sleight of men, in craftiness, after 
the wiles of error; but speaking the truth in 
love, may grow up in all things unto Him, who 
is the head, even Christ,^' as was Paul solici- 
tous for the stability and the spiritual success 
of the newborn at Ephesus. 

The multiplication of meetings also opens 
fields of service. All about the country we find 
churches who have planned for only a mini- 
mum of meetings. They regard it too expen- 
sive to keep their sanctuaries open every night, 
and needless, as well, since only a small com- 
pany congregates at the stated seasons of as- 
sembly. They seem to forget that there is such 
a thing as creating a center that calls its own 
congregation. Why is it that in village places 
every Saturday afternoon sees a fair congrega- 
tion at the corner grocery, or grouped before 
the postoffice, or crowded into the saloon ? Un- 
doubtedly in part, because men know these are 
congregating places. Theater managers are 
more shrewd than the majority of God's saints. 
They know that to keep open seven nights in 



THE REGULAR CHURCH SERVICES 141 

the week insures a better attendance upon each 
performance than if they presented entertain- 
ments spasmodically, or on fixed dates, con- 
siderably removed one from another. There is 
such a thing as creating in the hearts of church- 
men a desire to see one another daily, just as 
the members of an affectionate family delight 
to meet morning, noon and night. Such assem- 
blies create their own opportunities for service. 
Johnston Meyers proved himself in touch 
with the New Testament ideal when he delib- 
erately planned the six out-stations in Cincin- 
nati, in some one of which members of his 
church held a meerfiing every night in the 
week. A while ago we clipped from a religious 
newspaper a story of how a preacher, meeting 
on the hotel piazza a lady friend who was 
hastening to a late breakfast, was sa- 
luted by the remark, ^'I am late because I 
am tired. I danced last night until I blistered 
my feet.'' The preacher immediately put to 
her the question, "Did you ever blister your feet 
in the service of your Eedeemer?'' Without 
meaning in any way to condone the offense of 
dancing on the part of a so-called Christian 
woman, it may be in order to ask whether the 
life of the church of which she was a part 
presented any appeal, or even opportunity, to 
blister her feet in the service of her Kedeemer. 



142 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

After all that has been said, and justly said, 
about one's creating his own opportunities of 
service to Jesus Christ, it remains a solemn 
fact that the organized body has some obliga- 
tion to aid in multiplying these opportunities ; 
and the church that numbers but two or three 
assemblies in a week, and conducts no missions, 
has little ground of complaint when its young 
people turn from the dead institution to a 
live dance, an energetic game of cards, or the 
ever open theater. Youth is a hungry thing, 
and a restless thing. If it is not fed by the 
church, and set to work in the same, it forages 
elsewhere and remains to serve where it has 
been fed. 0. P. Gifford, of Buffalo, tells how 
General Lee, seeing a soldier off duty after 
green persimmons, called out sternly to him, 
"What are you doing there? Is that your 
diet?'' "No,'' answered the private; "I am 
shrinking my stomach to fit my diet." It is a 
sad day for any church when its slack service 
gives too great an opportunity to go after the 
green persimmons of worldliness, since the 
members who feed on them are shortly robbed 
of all spiritual capacity. 

The man who does too little for God is in 
danger of doing less. It is very easy for the 
one-service-a-week Christian to become a no- 
service Christian. Some years ago in Minne- 



THE REGULAR CHURCH SERVICES 143 

apolis a man testified in an after-meeting in 
these words : '^If anybody wants a receipt for 
half-hearted Christianity let him come to me. 
I have a perfect one. It served me for seven 
years, and I am done with it, and want to 
part with it. It is this : Shortly after I joined 
the church I decided that I didn^t care for the 
Sunday evening service; the morning sermon 
was enough. In the afternoon I visited or 
drove. At eventime I chatted, lounged, and 
read the newspaper. Soon I became dissatis- 
fied with my conduct, and excused it by criti- 
cising the ^uninteresting' Pastor. A little later 
I came to question whether the morning service 
repaid my pains, and gradually dropped out of 
that. For a time I drifted and came near con- 
cluding that Christianity was a failure, and 
the church a farce. But God at last opened 
my eyes to see my mistake, and now I am in 
every service, morning, noon, and night." And 
yet, though the man had adopted them all, 
he was putting in a poor proportion of his time 
at the House of God, and in work for God. 
There are 168 hours in a week. Who can 
imagine, therefore, that he has discharged his 
whole duty when he has spent four, or even 
six, of these in the service of the King. Paul 
appreciated the logic of things and hence wrote : 
"Let us hold fast the profession of our faith 



144 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

without wavering; for he is faithful that prom- 
ised; and let us consider one another to pro- 
voke unto love and to good works: not for- 
saking the assembling of ourselves together, 
as the manner of some is/^ If the saints at 
Jerusalem "day by day continued steadfastly 
with one accord in the temple" should we not 
inquire whether this sustains a certain defi- 
nite relation to the further statement, "The 
Lord added to them day by day those that 
were saved"? 

This leads us to the second remark : 

MAKE THESE SERVICES A MEDIUM OF SALVATION". 

From the sacred record it would appear that 
with that early church there was no other 
thought than that of employing their gather- 
ings to bring men to God. How far we have 
drifted from that divine ensample! How few 
of the ordinary services of the church are to- 
day supposed to be set for the salvation of 
men! The Sunday morning service is almost 
wholly dedicated to the culture of the saints; 
the Sunday School, in a majority of our 
churches, is intended as an opportunity for 
children to get a smattering of Scripture knowl- 
edge ; and in a great many churches the Sunday 
night service represents the one opportunity of 
evangelistic endeavor ; while the mid-week pray- 
er meeting furnishes occasion of talk and pray- 



THE REGULAR CHURCH SERVICES 145 

er; mission circles look to instruction regard- 
ing home and foreign fields, and the raising of 
money for the support of representatives; the 
Ladies' Aid provides opportunity for conversa- 
tion, repairing cushions, purchasing carpets, 
and providing social occasions. We enumer- 
ate these not to speak a word against what is 
being done, but to impress freshly the Scrip- 
tural ideal. 

TJie Sunday night service should he evan- 
gelistic. Somehow or other it has come about 
that the unsaved go to the Sunday evening 
services in larger numbers than to the services 
on Sunday morning, and the man who does 
not adapt his sermon to that fact misses a 
God-given opportunity, and is very likely to 
fail in his work in consequence of ignoring 
the fitness of things. To us it matters little 
that J. G. Holland once contended that, with 
his pastoral work, his funerals, marriages, civic 
concerns, social obligations, his work on com- 
mittees, secular and religious, etc., etc., it was 
a sort of outrage on the preacher's patience and 
endurance to expect him to prepare a second 
sermon for Sunday. He had better drop 
his interest in civics, cancel his social obli- 
gations, turn over committee work to unem- 
ployed laymen, and thereby find time for the 
preparation of the Sunday night sermon, lest 



146 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

he be guilty of practicing that part of the Epis- 
copalian creed which refers to a man's doing 
the things he ought not to have done and leav- 
ing undone the things he ought to have accom- 
plished. It is but a few years since Frederick 
Chapman, of the ^^Eam's Horn/' published an 
annual report for ten leading churches, in each 
of four leading denominations in Chicago, show- 
ing that in this time the ten Congregational 
churches had received 306, the ten Methodist 
342, the ten Presbyterian 409, and the ten 
Baptist 489, respectively, into their membership 
on profession of faith. This showing was not 
complimentary to any one of these churches; 
but the increase of some over others illustrated 
perfectly the emphasis the denomination in 
Chicago was then putting upon the Sunday 
night service as a medium for soul-winning. 

Every service, held in a church of Christ, 
should present salvation. Eead the sermons of 
Charles Spurgeon; you will see that the morn- 
ing discourses were as well adapted to the ac- 
complishment of redemption as were those de- 
livered at night. The man who never preaches 
a sermon to the unsaved in the Sunday morn- 
ing service neglects the only opportunity he 
ever has to reach many unregenerate men. 
The husbands of Christian wives commonly 
attend this service with them, but seldom see 



THE REGULAR CHURCH SERVICES 147 

the sanctuary either Sunday evening or in 
seasons of special meetings. The idea, particu- 
larly prevalent in the North of our country, 
that a man is not to invite men to rise for 
prayer, or come forward to confess Christ in 
a forenoon service, was evidently an invention 
of the Adversary, and is now defended by cheap 
aristocracy. It is impossible to speak with 
sufficient enthusiasm of evidences of the Holy 
Ghost's work which the writer has witnessed 
in connection with an evangelistic sermon for 
Sunday morning. Why should not the mid- 
week prayer meeting be made the occasion also 
for soul-winning? There is no better atmos- 
phere for the work of the Spirit than that 
created by the testimonies of experience and 
the petitions of an earnest people. In fact 
why should not Christian Endeavor prayer 
meetings, meetings in the interest of missions, 
and even social meetings be employed to the 
same high end? Russell Conwell affirms that 
his annual church fair has been so conducted 
as to be the best soul-winning meeting of the 
year. If church fairs must be conducted let 
them be of this sort! 

What it might mean to key the whole church, 
in its various forms of activity, to the note of 
salvation, Dr. Robbins of Cincinnati has re- 
cently illustrated. He and his people, of the 



148 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

Lincoln Park Temple, began January 1, 1903, 
to pray and labor for an addition of two 
hundred members before January 1, 1904. 
Every meeting was made to conserve this pur- 
pose, to aid in answering this prayer. At the 
end of six months and six days there were an 
even hundred who had been received; and 
at the end of twelve months, two hundred and 
seven. The pastor significantly added, "The 
seven being the Lord's good measure." Now, 
to understand the real secret of this successful 
work one needs to follow him a little further 
in his remarks: "Our church is always open 
from seven in the morning till ten at night, 
or even twelve, every day in the year. At every 
service the Bible is read, or quoted, and prayer 
is offered. At each of the prayer meetings invi- 
tations are given to Christians, backsliders, sin-< 
ners, to manifest, by rising, a desire to be re- 
membered in special prayers. At the close of 
the morning sermon I always give an invitation 
for any whose hearts have been pricked to 
manifest the same by rising. Every Sabbath 
night in the year we have an after meeting. 
I always ask God to use the sermon in the sal- 
vation of souls. In calling I make religion the 
subject of conversation, and almost always ask 
if I may kneel and pray.'' Again we say every 
service should present the subject of salvation! 



THE REGULAR CHURCH SERVICES 149 

Every organization should have the same oh- 
ject. From the highest office to the humblest, 
from the most important organization to the 
one of least concern, all should be made to con- 
tribute to evangelistic endeavor. When in the 
second chapter of Acts the believers were "added 
together" or organized, it was not for the pur- 
poses of self-defense, but to propagate the truth 
and make converts. So in the sixth chapter of 
Acts, when deacons were elected the reason 
assigned was the excellent one of giving the 
apostles more time for prayer and the ministry 
of the Word. 

When Paul and Barnabas were commissioned 
as evangelists this new office was created by 
the Spirit for this same purpose of soul-win- 
ning; and as from time to time offices and 
organizations multiply. Christian men should 
not forget the solitary occasion of their exist- 
ence. The supreme purpose of the Ladies' Aid 
Society is not the covering of nakedness, and 
the satiating of hunger, but a robe of right- 
eousness and the Bread of life instead. The 
supreme purpose of a Christian college is not 
the education of an intellect, the turning out 
of an Ingersoll, but the salvation of a soul and 
the evolution of a saint. 

Dr. Hillis, speaking of mechanical discov- 
eries, says : "Each tool is ordained of God for 



150 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

the re-enforcement of manhood. Every time 
a river is enslaved a thousand men are set free. 
Every time an iron wheel is mastered a thou- 
sand human muscles are emancipated/^ Be- 
loved, machinery in the church of God ought 
to mean the same thing. If it does not set 
men free from the enslavement of sin, if it 
does not emancipate their minds from the bonds 
of unbelief, it comes short of the Divine will 
concerning it, and has little right to wear the 
name of Christ. When we say all church ma- 
chinery, involving every officer and every or- 
ganization, should be made to serve the inter- 
ests of evangelism, we say exactly what we mean 
—All! 

YIELD TO THE ADMINISTRATION OF THE SPIRIT. 

In reading the marvelous record of the sec- 
ond chapter of Acts one is always likely to for- 
get the administration of the Spirit; likely to 
forget that all of this came to pass only because 
He came upon the disciples. Dr. Cummings 
remarks: "The Holy Ghost from the day of 
Pentecost has occupied an entirely new posi- 
tion. The whole administration of the affairs 
of the Church of Christ since that day have 
devolved upon him. . . . That day was the 
installation of the Holy Spirit as the admin- 
istrator of all things.'^ The Apostle Paul con- 



THE REGULAR CHURCH SERVICES 151 

firms Cummings' opinion, when in the twelfth 
chapter of First Corinthians he gives the Holy 
Ghost the administration over all; "diversities 
of gifts, but the same Spirit." "Diversities 
of workings, but the same God/' Different 
works, manifestation of "the same Spirit." 
Gifts of "faith, in the same Spirit"; "gifts of 
healing in the one Spirit." Then, after nam- 
ing "miracles," "prophecy," "tongues," "inter- 
pretations," he adds: "But all these worketh 
the one and the self-same Spirit, dividing to 
each one severally even as He will." 

It is the right of the Spirit then to admin- 
ister the services of Sunday. There is no por- 
tion of the Sabbath service which can be ren- 
dered apart from the Holy Ghost. Peter was 
compelled to say, "We have preached the Gospel 
unto you with the Holy Ghost sent down from 
heaven." And Paul expresses it, "Praying with 
all prayer and supplication in the Spirit." 
Jude adds, "Praying in the Holy Ghost." 
What is the value of prayer except it be "in 
the Spirit"? Paul insists that if we sing we 
must sing "in the Spirit." And Paul again 
says: "My preaching was not with enticing 
word of man's wisdom, but in demonstration 
of the Spirit and of power." When one re- 
members that no man can say "Jesus is Lord, 
but in the Holy Spirit," he realizes then that 



152 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

except He administer the services of the sanc- 
tuary they are administered in vain. 

The difference between a man-administered 
service and the service administered by the 
Holy Ghost is illustrated in the first and sec- 
ond chapters of Acts. In the first chapter, 
before the Spirit had descended upon them, 
they held a business meeting and made choice 
of Matthias, and the whole procedure was a 
mistake. After the Spirit had come upon them 
they held a street meeting; thousands were 
saved, and the sample church of the centuries 
brought almost instantly into existence. The 
words of Jesus to His immediate disciples 
should have no less meaning to twentieth cen- 
tury Christians : "Tarry ye until ye be endued 
with power from on High.^^ When Mr. Moody 
heard a man say, "It remains for the world to 
see what God could do with a man fully sur- 
rendered to the Spirit,^^ he is reputed to have 
answered: "Then it shall see, for I will be 
that man.^^ But it still remains for the world 
to see what God can do with a church which 
is absolutely Spirit-administered. Truly, as 
one has said, "It would not enjoy a perennial 
revival, but rather a continuous ^vival,' for 
its abundant life would destroy any necessity 
of being revived.'^ 



THE REGULAR CHURCH SERVICES 153 

All meetings, in the name of Christ, should 
he Spirit-administered. Surely the Mission 
Circle should be Spirit-administered. It was 
the Holy Ghost who said, "Separate me Bar- 
nabas and Saul for the work whereunto I have 
called them/^ He alone can use the workers! 
It was the Holy Ghost who sent them into Seleu- 
cia. He alone can appoint the place of their 
labors. It was when Saul was filled with the 
Holy Ghost that he rebuked Elymas, the sor- 
cerer, and brought even the wicked deputy to 
believe, ''hemg astonished at the doctrine of 
the Lord.'^ He only can conquer opposition 
and make conquest of the most rebellious hearts. 

The average prayer meeting has a poor ex- 
istence because the Pastor, or some other hu- 
man leader, insists upon presiding over it, and 
deciding who shall pray, and advising who 
shall testify. Pestiferous as are the men who 
testify at great length, and injurious to the 
meeting as are those who ^^pray always,^^ these 
are not responsible for the paralysis of most 
prayer meetings. The trouble lies in another 
direction; the Holy Ghost has not been per- 
mitted to administer, a man-made program 
has been foisted upon the meeting, and people 
wonder why the Holy Ghost does not carry 
it out. "Where the Spirit of the Lord is there 
is liberty," and testimonies will not be want- 



154 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

ing; for all the prayers indicted our impatient 
times will not be willing to wait. 

Finally, Whatever the plans or the purposes 
of church life the Spirit should administer 
them. There is one feature of that Council 
at Jerusalem which approved its conclusions, 
and that was expressed in these words: "It 
seemed good to the Holy Ghost and to us." 
His will once learned, ours should always be 
conformed to it. The sainted Gordon has wise- 
ly remarked, "Whether the authority of this 
one ruling sovereign Holy Ghost be recognized 
or ignored determines whether the church shall 
be a unity or an anarchy.^^ "The unity of the 
Spirit" is a phrase born of inspiration and be- 
tokens power. Who can tell what it would 
mean to have the Holy Ghost so govern in 
all plans, purposes and appointments of the 
church that the entire membership should work 
as under one man? Who can tell what might 
be accomplished if only men gave themselves 
absolutely to the government of the Holy 
Ghost? In talking once with B. F. Jacobs he 
remarked upon the moving of the Immanuel 
Baptist Church, Chicago, something after this 
manner: "When the church decided to re- 
move their building about fifty feet south in 
order to escape the over-shadowing hotel, sev- 
eral contractors said it could not be done. 



THE REGULAR CHURCH SERVICES 155 

Finally, however, one brave contractor said, 
'Show me the money and it shall come to pass/ 
The bargain was made. Fifty jackscrews were 
brought, the house was undergirded, and two 
hundred men put to work, four to every screw. 
One man turned the screw a quarter of the 
way around, and in courses of fifty they acted 
in concert. When, however, the four courses 
had finished their tugging at the screws one 
could see no motion in the building. But, 
said Jacobs, "If you put your hand on the wall 
you could feel it tremble." A few days later 
that great stone edifice was lifted into the air, 
and shortly made its journey to its new loca- 
tion. 

If the administration of the Holy Ghost was 
properly admitted the members of the church 
would find themselves acting in concert, and 
the rise of such a church would be so evidently 
visible, and its progress to the place of Divine 
appointment so rapid that all men would be 
astonished by it. 

The words of Jesus are as applicable today 
as they were nineteen centuries ago, and as 
truly addressed to the organized bodies of be- 
lievers as to individuals: 'Te shall receive 
power after that the Holy Ghost is come upon 
you.'' 



HUSBANDING THE RESULTS OF THE 
PEEENNIAL EEVIVAL. 



CHAPTEE VIII. 

HUSBANDIISrG THE EESULTS OF THE 
PERENNIAL REYIYAL. 

In a former chapter we spoke of the second 
chapter of Acts as a rich pocket in the great 
mine of God^s truth, and suggested the likeli- 
hood of returning to it for illustration again 
and again in the progress of these pages. Is 
it not true that verses forty-one and forty-seven 
of this great chapter are replete with sugges- 
tions regarding this subject? Here is the re- 
port of a mighty revival, the results of which 
are so well husbanded that the accessions to 
the church receive ideal care and illustrate 
ideal conditions. It has long been the cus- 
tom of men to regard this old First Church at 
Jerusalem as a sample, in all respects, of what 
a Church of Christ, wherever found, should 
be. That the custom is well warranted seems 
proven by the circumstance that the modern 
church, partaking of the spirit and adopting 
the plans which characterized the organization 
at Jerusalem, has commonly been successful 
beyond her sisters. 

Turning, then, to this text, we hear it said 

of the new converts, "They, then, that received 

His word were baptized: and there were added 

159 



160 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

unto them in that day about three thousand 
souls. And they continued steadfastly in the 
apostles' teaching and fellowship, in the break- 
ing of bread and in prayers. And fear came 
upon every soul: and many wonders and signs 
were done by the apostles. And all that be- 
lieved were together, and had all things com- 
mon; and they sold their possessions and 
goods, and parted them to all, according as any 
man had need. And day by day, continuing 
steadfastly with one accord in the temple, and 
breaking bread at home, they did take their 
food with gladness and singleness of heart, 
praising God and having favor with all the peo- 
ple. And the Lord added to them day by day 
those that were being saved." 

Accepting this inspired report as a sample 
for our behavior toward the results of a re- 
vival, some obligations are clearly set forth. 

I. THE DUTY OF INDOCTRINATION-. 

"And they continued steadfastly in the apos- 
tles' teaching." Every new member of a 
church needs to be indoctrinated. The apos- 
tles' teaching here was in perfect accord with 
the Word; in fact, it was nothing other than 
instruction in the Word. One can not read 
the preceding verses, which give the brief of 
Peter's sermon, without discovering how they 
dealt with the great doctrines of the Word. 



HUSBANDING THE RESULTS 161 

Doctrine determines character. The religious 
teaching one receives determines not only his 
opinion, but his personality. "As a man think- 
eth in his heart, so is he/' By experience and 
observation we see that statement of the 
Scripture constantly verified. It is true that 
''out of the heart are the issues of life"; but 
it is equally true that the head largely con- 
trols the heart, and unless one with the head 
rightly apprehends the fundamental doctrines 
of the Scripture his heart is not to be depended 
upon; and his character will constantly evince 
corresponding defects. The somewhat popular 
opinion, now often and eloquently expressed, 
to the effect that it makes little difference what 
one believes if only he is sincere, is not only 
without the warrant of Scripture, but opposed 
alike by all observation and experience. The 
Word of God contains more than a trend of 
thought; it is possible for those who are un- 
prejudiced and obedient students to find in 
its great sentences "common ground of agree- 
ment on definite points,^' and so formulate 
their doctrines and systematize their theology. 

By systematizing theology we do not neces- 
sarily mean the skeleton that is used in Theo- 
logical Seminaries. It was that sort of sys- 
tematized theology against which Mr. Beecher 



162 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

delighted to hurl his philippics. On one oc- 
casion he said: *^The doctrines which the 
schools teach are no more like those of the 
Bible than the carved beams of Solomon's tem- 
ple were like God's cedar trees on Mount Leba- 
non. But men cut and hew till they have 
shaped their own fancies out of God's timber, 
and then they get upon them like judgment- 
day thrones and call all the world to answer 
at their feet for heresies against their idols." 

But the doctrines to which dry theologians 
have given statements are one thing, while the 
great truths embodied in texts of Scripture are 
another thing; and it is this latter thing that 
humble students of the Word transmute into 
temperament and personality. Prof. James 
Orr, in his volume, "The Christian View of 
God and the World,^' says: "If there is a re- 
ligion in the world which exalts the office of 
teaching, it is safe to say that it is the re- 
ligion of Jesus Christ. It has been frequently 
remarked that in pagan religions the doctrinal 
element is at a minimum — the chief thing there 
is the performance of a ritual. But this is 
precisely where Christianity distinguishes itself 
from other positive teaching; it claims to be 
the truth ; it bases religion on knowledge which 
is only attainable under moral conditions. I 
do not see how any one can deal fairly with 



HUSBANDING THE RESULTS 163 

the facts as they lie before us in the Gospels 
and Epistles without coming to the conclu- 
sion that the New Testament is full of doc- 
trine. . . . The Gospel is no mere proclama- 
tion of ^eternal truths/ but the discovery of 
a saving purpose of God for mankind, executed 
in time. But the doctrines are the interpreta- 
tion of the facts. The facts do not stand blank 
and dumb before us, but have a voice given to 
them, and a meaning put into them. They are 
accompanied by living speech, which makes 
their meaning clear. When John declares that 
Jesus Christ is come in the flesh and is the Son 
of God, he is stating a fact, but he is none the 
less enunciating a doctrine. When Paul af- 
firms, Thrist died for our sins according to 
the Scriptures,^ he is proclaiming a fact, but 
he is at the same time giving an interpretation 
of it." It makes all the difference whether 
one's course in life is determined by the dogmas 
of Scripture or not, that exist between the 
Spirit-guided and self-governed man. 

Sound doctrine, therefore, is all essential. 
Paul wrote to his children in the faith — ^the 
Ephesians — calling upon them to come with 
him to a more perfect stature in Christ Jesus, 
and assigned his reason: "That ye may be no 
longer children tossed to and fro and carried 
about with every wind of doctrine." To the 



164 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

Hebrews he said: "Be not carried away by 
divers and strange teachings (or doctrines), for 
it is good that the heart be stablished by 
grace." The history that professed Chris- 
tians are constantly making is an ever grow- 
ing illustration of the need of that apostle's 
appeal. 

Years since, in England, the great Spurgeon, 
who had stood nearly alone in his defense of the 
full inspiration of the old Book, speaking to 
the subject, "A Spiritual Eevival the Want of 
the Church," said: "The absence of sound 
doctrine has, to a great degree, ceased. , . . 
We have a new theology. New theology ! Why, 
it is anything but a theology ! What we have 
now is an ology which has cast God off ut- 
terly and entirely and enthroned man, as it is 
the doctrine of man and not the doctrine of 
the everlasting God." There were plenty of 
people who thought Spurgeon a croaker and 
supposed his words had little or no occasion. 
But the annual reports of English Evangelical 
denominations are bringing the churches of that 
land to realize more and more the secret of the 
great preacher's success, and at the same time 
they begin to understand the mystery of fail- 
ure in many churches. It may be easier to com- 
promise with every peer who puts forth a 
philosophy of religion which we have not found 



HUSBANDING THE RESULTS 165 

in the Scripture, but, be it remembered, when 
one trades the Truth of God for a temporary 
truce he pauperizes himself and does the cause 
of Christ an irreparable wrong. Ernest Gor- 
don, speaking of his father, the noble pastor of 
Clarendon Street, said : "His obedience to God 
was as unquestioning as that of the legiona- 
ries to Caesar. Much as he disliked controversy, 
the imminent probability of trouble never 
tempted him to curtail or to conceal the least 
essential of his convictions. 'Better the 
Church militant,' he said, ^Dattling for the truth 
than the Church complaisant surrendering 
truth for the sake of peace. The Prince of 
Peace is a Man of war. Let us be less afraid 
of condemnation for the truth than of com- 
munion with error.' " Where the Scriptures 
speak, let not the Christian be silent! God 
forbid that any preacher should do other than 
teach the truth which God has proclaimed! 
Paul wrote to Timothy, "All Scripture is given 
by inspiration and is profitable for doctrine," 
and the early preachers illustrated that profit. 
It can not be reckoned a mere coincidence that 
those men who were so fruitful in good works 
were the most faithful to every letter of the 
Divine Word. 

Eusebius, in his "Church History," quotes 
Irenaeus as having said : "I can recall the very 



166 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

place where Polycarp used to sit and teach, his 
manner of speech, his mode of life, his appear- 
ance, the style of his address, his frequent ref- 
erences to St. John and to others who had seen 
our Lord; how he used to repeat from memory 
the discourses which he had heard from them 
concerning our Lord, His miracles and His 
mode of teaching; and how, being instructed 
himself by those who were eye-witnesses of the 
Light of the World, there was in all that he 
said a strict agreement with the Scriptures/' 
Do we wonder that Polycarp was a power ? Are 
we surprised that he should be among the 
church fathers whose writings are reckoned 
most sacred and Christian, and whose converts 
were a multitude? The man of whose teach- 
ing it can be said, "There is a strict agreement 
with the Scriptures,'* is God's prophet indeed. 
The promise of success will be fulfilled to 
him, for 'Tie that abideth in the doctrine of 
Christ, he hath both the Father and the Son. 
If there come any unto you and bring not this 
doctrine, receive him not into your house, nei- 
ther bid him godspeed ; for he that biddeth him 
godspeed is partaker of his evil ways." Our 
churches have no more solemn duty today 
toward their children, new-born, or better- 
grown, than to instruct them in the greater 
truths of Scripture. Some of us have found it 



HUSBANDING THE RESULTS 167 

well worth while to set apart twenty evenings 
in the winter months for this solitary purpose. 
When men know the truth "the truth shall 
make them free." 

THE FURNISHING OF FELLOWSHIP. 

Eeturning again to our remarkable mine, we 
find the Sacred Record saying that they con- 
tinued not alone in the apostles' doctrine, but 
"in fellowship." The word "fellowship" there 
ought to imply every phase of friendship that 
is pure, and needful to the new life in Christ. 

The church should furnish her new converts 
with social fellowship. They have come to her 
from the fellowship of the world, from the af- 
fection and friendship of the unregenerate. In 
that fellowship they have found something of 
pleasure. It is in vain to insist that men find 
no gratification in the fellowship of the flesh. 
There is enjoyment there. One of Satan's strong- 
est temptations is at this point. To part with the 
companions of evil is often the hardest require- 
ment for those who are convicted of their need 
of Christ. This sacrifice is made the more 
difficult by Satan's suggestion that the church 
will furnish nothing as a compensation for 
their surrender of the world's fellowship. 
Would that "the accuser of the brethren" had 
less occasion to make this suggestion. Chris- 



168 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

tian people ought to give such royal welcome 
to every convert from the world as to make that 
temptation longer impossible. For every hand 
let go when one turns his back upon the old 
life, there ought to be a score outstretched in 
friendly grasp. For every part of ajffection re- 
signed in parting from fleshly associates there 
ought to be sainted hearts offering unstinted 
love. It is a blessed thing when a young man, 
or woman, who has been popular with the 
world's set and for Christ's sake turns from it, 
if he or she can testify to having found larger 
and truer friendship in the church. There is 
no time in human experience when the heart 
hungers for fellowship as in that season which 
immediately follows conversion. There is no 
time when one's whole being is so sensitive to 
the touch of a friendly hand as when first he 
confesses Jesus Christ, and there is no time 
when one is so sensitive to carelessness and in- 
different treatment as then. To our dying day 
we will carry fresh in memory the man or the 
woman who gave us a warm welcome into the 
fellowship of Christ. No wonder James Mont- 
gomery wrote: 

"People of the living God, 

I have sought the world around, 
Paths of sin and sorrow trod, 

Peace and comfort nowhere found. 



HUSBANDING THE RESULTS 169 

Now to you my spirit turns — 

Turns, a fugitive unblest; 
Brethren where your altar burns, 

O receive me into rest. 

Lonely I no longer roam, 

Like the cloud, the wind, the wave; 
Where you dwell shall be my home, 

Where you die shall be my grave. 
Mine the God whom you adore; 

Your Redeemer shall be mine; 
Earth can fill my soul no more; 

Every idol I resign," 

And for every idol given up God's people 
ought to furnish a friend. 

There is a power for social fellowship which 
our churches have but poorly improved, and 
that is the Christian home. We speak now of 
the house in which we dwell. There can be 
little question that the better homes of the 
city are, as a rule, occupied by Christian men 
and women. Why should not these gifts from 
our Lord be oftener employed for His cause 
and the social pleasures of His people ? If the 
most attractive of these homes were opened 
to church life, as the homes of the worldly are 
constantly open to social gayeties, Satan would 
not so easily retain his hold upon the Lord's 
people. They would find that for which the 
young heart yearns, namely, the highest and 
most attractive social life; and our Saviour 



170 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

would have at His command another and one of 
the most effective forces of modern civilization. 
A sainted pastor said touching the Scripture : 
"He hath visited and redeemed His people/^ 
"Four times in the Gospels is our Lord^s ad- 
vent to earth spoken of as a visit, but it was 
a visit which never for a moment looked 
toward His abiding. At His birth He was 
laid in a borrowed manger; at His burial He 
was laid in a borrowed tomb, and between the 
cradle and the grave was a sojourn in which 
the Son of Man had not place to lay His head. 
The mountain-top, whither He constantly with- 
drew to commune with His Father, was the 
nearest to His home, and hence there is a 
strange, pathetic meaning in that saying, "And 
every one went to his own house — Jesus went 
into the Mount of Olives." Beloved, that was 
when the world knew Him not; that was when 
the Church was poor, and, like its Master, 
scarce had where to lay its head. Today we 
are rich and increased with goods. The palaces 
of the earth are in our possession. Shall we 
shut Him out of them, or shall we open wide 
the doors and, calling in His friends, expect 
Him to come and find in the host and hostess 
faithful followers and friends, who shall say, 
"Blessed Master, here is our home ? It is thine 
also ! Use it to Thy glory ! Employ it for the 



HUSBANDING THE RESULTS 171 

improvement of Thy people and for the prog- 
ress of Thy Church/^ The house on the hill 
of Bethany was a sample after which the homes 
of the saints should be patterned, that through 
them Christ might the more speedily conquer, 
and in them His followers find the sweetest of 
all social fellowship. 

There is no fellowship comparable to fellow- 
ship in Christ. John Lord, in his essay on 
"Paula/^ speaking of the friendship existing 
between her and Jerome, says : "A mere worldly 
life could not have produced such a friendship, 
for it would have been ostentatious, or prodigal, 
or vain; allied with sumptuous banquets, with 
intellectual tournaments, with selfish aims, with 
foolish presents, with emotions that degene- 
rated into passions. Ennui, disappointment, 
burdensome obligation, ultimate disgust, are 
the result of what is based on the finite and the 
worldly. . . . How unsatisfactory and 
mournful the friendship between Voltaire and 
Frederick the Great, with all their brilliant 
qualities and mutual flatteries ! How unmean- 
ing would have been a friendship between 
Chesterfield and Dr. Johnson, even had the 
latter stooped to all the arts of sycophancy.^' 

But how different the fellowship of those who 
are one in the faith that is in Christ; who are 
moved by kindred purposes, inspired by the 



172 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

same great Spirit, praying for the same noble 
ends, pressing forward for the same unspeak- 
able prize ! Of the early Christians it was said, 
"Behold, how they love one another" ; and of the 
present-day Christians the same expression ap- 
plies. People who are one in faith know the 
sweetest fellowship on the earth. There is no 
dearer delight than the communion of real 
saints. The richest hours of life are those 
spent in the company of such Christians as ex- 
cite you to no suspicion, but call you to per- 
fect confidence; whose motives you know to 
conceal no evil thing, whose spirit you believe 
to be unselfish, whose secret life you are per- 
fectly convinced is clean, and whose steps and 
thoughts are ordered of the Lord. Anna Bar- 
bauld was thinking of this very thing when she 
wrote : 

"How blest the sacred tie that binds, 

In sweet communion, kindred minds ! 

How swift the heavenly course they run, 

Whose hearts, whose faith, whose hopes are one. 

To each the soul of each how dear! 
What tender love, what holy fear ! 
How doth the generous flame within 
Refine from earth, and cleanse from sin ! 

Their streaming tears together flow, 
For human guilt and human woe; 
Their ardent prayers united rise. 
Like mingling flames in sacrifice. 



HUSBANDING THE RESULTS 173 

Nor shall the glowing flame expire, 
When dimly burns frail nature's fire ; 
Then shall they meet in realms above, 
A heaven of joy, a heaven of love." 

Into such a fellowship the new converts of a 
church have a right to come, and if a church 
fails in any measure to furnish it, it comes 
short, by so much, of being acceptable to its 
Saviour and God. 

The house of God should be a center of so- 
cial fellowship. Why should this beautiful 
building be shut for four or five days a week 
against its own supporters, and those also who 
more sadly need Christian influence and fel- 
lowship? The keeping of the house of God 
open every night in the week is not such an 
additional expense as to make the experiment 
impossible. Let it be understood that the Holy 
Sanctuary is not to be made a playhouse, or a 
cheap store, where donated ice cream and 
well-watered lemonade are on sale in the name 
of sweet charity. Such things never provide 
for the highest fellowship, and they truly fail 
to advance spiritual interest. Assemblies called 
together to study the Word of God; suppers 
served, at actual expense, to be followed by a 
program that will be instructive to the mind 
and stimulating to the soul; prayer meetings 
with specific objects; missionary convocations 



174 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

that look to the support of the work at home 
and abroad, with an occasional evening in 
which the people meet solely for the purpose 
of conversation^ acquaintance and closer fellow- 
ship — these we have found to be the affairs that 
bring content to the new convert, that win 
many from sin to the Saviour, and that splen- 
didly help the cause of the Son of God, as that 
cause is represented by the Church. Let us 
continue steadfastly "in fellowship." 

GROWTH IN THE ESSENTIAL GRACES. 

The old First Church at Jerusalem went 
from the apostles' doctrine and fellowship to 
"the breaking of bread and the prayers. And 
fear came upon every soul: and many wonders 
and signs were done by the apostles. And all 
that believed were together, and had all things 
common; and they sold their possessions and 
goods, and parted them to all, according as any 
man had need. And day by day, continuing 
steadfastly with one accord in the temple, and 
breaking bread at home, they did take their 
food with gladness and singleness of heart, 
praising God and having favor with all the 
people. And the Lord added to them day by 
day those that were being saved." (R. V.) 

There are here at least three important sug- 
gestions of husbanding the results of a revival. 



HUSBANDING THE RESULTS 175 

They emphasized the spiritual culture of the 
individual. The administration of the Lord's 
Supper and the exercise of prayer are divinely 
appointed means to that end. We can do no 
better for the new convert than keep before him 
the great truth that Christ died for him; and 
the great necessity of constant communion with 
the Saviour. These things tend to create an 
atmosphere in which the individual will ex- 
perience spiritual progress. Charles Spurgeon, 
in his volume entitled "The Soul Winner/' 
says, "Some converts are like certain insects 
which are the product of an exceedingly warm 
day, and die when the sun goes down; or, like 
the Salamander, they live only while the fire 
lasts and expire at a low temperature." What 
business has a church permitting the sun of 
its spiritual life to go down? What business 
have we, who are older in the faith, to let the 
fires die down? Every babe born into the 
home by his very coming necessitates a tem- 
perature in that house which is much beyond 
the normal; and every soul born into the 
Church of God has a right to expect there a 
spiritual temperature in which the least and 
tenderest life can be maintained and increased. 
It is no surprise that many of the churches 
of this country report "no baptisms"; that 
others report "few baptisms," when one re- 



176 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

members that God might demur at casting new- 
born Christians into a spiritual ice chest. We 
have heard a woman pray for an increase in the 
spiritual temperature of her church, and an- 
nounce as a reason, ^Tor, Lord, we long to see 
souls born from above ; but we know that Thou 
wilt not send infants into a snowbank." The 
secret of Pentecost was in the ten days' prayer 
meeting. The spiritual state of that people was 
such that Grod could entrust to them three 
thousand converts! What a suggestion here 
for the members of churches who are praying 
for a perennial revival. 

Here also is the suggestion of selfsacrifice. 
"All that believed were together and had all 
things common ; and they sold their possessions 
and goods, and parted them to all, according 
as any man had need.'' God must have had a 
purpose in moving this first Christian church 
to give after such a manner. He must have 
intended that the churches of all countries and 
all ages should see in these saints samples of 
sacrifice for Christ's sake. This inspired 
record is a call to the people of the present 
to 'lay by in store on the first day of the week 
as God has prospered them"; the rich in 
greater sums, the poor in smaller, yet divinely 
proportioned. 

In the beginning of 1853 George Miiller was 



HUSBANDING THE RESULTS 177 

in need of funds for his great orphanage. He 
went to God in prayer and there came from 
one person $40,000; and immediately follow- 
ing it Is 7d, contributed by two factory girls. 
The rich and the poor joined in carrying on 
that mighty work of God, and by their con- 
tributions gave equal evidence of their Chris- 
tianity. "The Son of Man came not to be 
ministered unto, but to minister, and to give 
His life a ransom for many.'^ To be a Chris- 
tian at all is to copy Him. 

The best test of one's profession of faith is 
the collection plate. It has been said that *^the 
prayer meeting is the thermometer of the 
church's life." It may be a thermom- 
eter, but the test of the church's life 
is the treasurer's report. The man who 
communes much with God thereby comes 
into a sweet fellowship with Him, and will, 
in consequence, sacrifice for Him. Con- 
tributing to Christ's cause he will count one 
of the privileges of his life. In Paris a poor, 
blind woman put 27 francs into a plate at a 
missionary meeting, and when one went to her 
and remonstrated against her giving so much, 
she said, "I am engaged with others in straw 
work. Much of our labor is at night. My 
friends about me here are at an expense of 27 
francs per annum for oil; but, as I am blind. 



178 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

and do not need a lamp, I give what I save out 
of that circumstance to shed light into the 
heathen lands to those who are spiritually 
blind." 

Finally, these new converts became fervent 
winners of souls. That is evidenced in the 
language, ^'The Lord added unto the church 
day by day such as were being saved." One need 
not be in a church for many years before ever 
attempting to bring others to Jesus. Such an 
opinion was unknown to the early disciples. So 
soon as Andrew came to know Jesus, who He 
was, we read, "He findeth his own brother and 
saith unto Him, We have found the Messias, 
and he brought him to Jesus." So soon as 
Philip accepted the Nazarene as the Son of 
God, he findeth Nathaniel. This custom of the 
early church ought to characterize the churches 
of Christ to this day. A few years ago, in 
Owatonna, Minn., a fine young fellow — a 
student in Pillsbury Academy — came forward 
at the close of a meeting and confessed Christ. 
The testimony of others was heard and a second 
song was sung. Immediately this young man 
arose and walked to the back of the house and 
up into the gallery. The Evangelist feared 
that the young student's heart had failed him, 
and he had decided to return to his seat "rather 
than longer face the crowd. Shortly this fear 



HUSBANDING THE RESULTS 179 

was allayed when that young student came for- 
ward, bringing with him a friend, who peni- 
tently confessed Christ. 

When we so well husband the results of a 
revival as to see the man who has spent but a 
day with Jesus going after his fellows, telling 
them of Him of whom he has found, we will 
indeed have introduced a prominent factor in 
favor of the perennial revival. 



THE RELATION OF STEEET PEEACH- 
ING TO THE PERENNIAL EEVIVAL. 



CHAPTEEIX. 

THE KELATION OF STREET PREACH- 
ING TO THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL. 

There are two great commissions in the New 
Testament. One of these is recorded in Mat- 
thew 28:19: "Go ye, therefore, and teach all 
nations, baptizing them in the name of the 
Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost." 
The other is Luke 14 :21 : "Go out quickly 
into the streets and lanes of the city, and 
bring in hither the poor, and the maimed, and 
the halt, and the blind." The first looks to 
the evangelization of the world — ^the object for 
which Christ died; the second, to the winning 
of the city — ^the storm-center of civilization, 
and the stronghold of Satan. 

One can not properly understand the great 
commission of Matthew 28 :19, nor truly inter- 
pret Luke 14 :21, without being impressed with 
the fact that the evangelization of the city, and 
the bearing witness to the world, involve open 
air work. The Salvation Army has set the 
churches a needed example. A few years ago 
their out-door work was considered an inno- 
vation, and, by not a few, an insult to the 
conservative methods of the more conserva- 

1.83 



184 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

tive churches. How strange that men so often 
forget to confront the religious novelty with 
the question, "What did Jesus do?^' and, by 
comparison, reach a conclusion. Sometimes 
our Saviour spake in the synagogue ; more often 
in the field ; but most often in the street. The 
perennial revival must in some measure depend 
upon a return to the Master's methods. Have 
we ever stopped to analyze the philosophy of 
Christ's conduct when He chooses the street 
for pulpit and auditors? The study of the 
parable in Luke 14:15-24 reveals at once the 
wisdom and the grace of street work. 

THE MISERY OF THE STREETS. 

Taking up its suggestions in order we are 
at once and deeply impressed with the misery 
of the streets. "Go out quickly into the streets 
and lanes of the city and bring in hither the 
poor, and the maimed, and the halt, and the 
blind." 

The poor are in the streets of the city. We 
may not understand it, but it is a fact that the 
poorest of the poor prefer city life. It is prob- 
able that that indigence which precludes the 
success of many people, is often associated with 
an abnormal sociability. Dr. P. S. Henson 
used to tell the story of an Irish woman in 
Chicago who had been in the slums for years 



RELATION OF STREET PREACHING 185 

and was always a pestiferous dependent. By 
and by some of the people, to whom she had 
made herself a nuisance, presented her a 
purse and shipped her several miles into the 
country. A few weeks later she was found 
in her old haunts, and when asked why she 
was willing to quit the open country with its 
beautiful landscape, its invigorating air, its 
comparative plenty, and go back to her place 
of squalor, foul air, and starvation, she an- 
swered: "Sure, and I got tired of seeing only 
stumps; rd rather look at people.^^ That this 
social nature accounts for the fact that great 
sections of cities become poverty centers we 
do not affirm; but that they are such centers 
no one questions. 

You may travel the war-cursed South and 
stop with the colored people and the poor 
whites, and see many evidences of poverty that 
are painful, but for sheer suffering we know 
nothing that equals the squalor of city life. 
In a northern city, famed for its wealth and 
culture, not twelve blocks from the City Hall, 
and not one block from splendid residences, we 
found a man utterly deserted, lying on a pallet 
of straw in the corner of an otherwise empty 
house, dying of starvation and disease without 
sympathy or assistance. That day the truth 
of this text was burned into our heart: "The 



186 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

poor are in the streets of the city/^ A man, 
therefore, who takes a dry goods box and con- 
verts it into a pulpit and speaks to the passing 
crowds gets a portion, at least, of the class 
of people to whom Christ devoted so much of 
His ministry. 

The maimed are in the streets of the city. 
This term comprehends individuals of every so- 
cial station and class. The maimed man may 
be rich or poor, ignorant or highly educated, 
stooped with the weight of age, or buoyant 
with the blood of youth. But the great major- 
ity of the maimed are in the streets of the 
city, and this statement remains true whetheij 
you speak of the physical or moral man. The 
car-wheel that mercilessly grinds beneath its 
weight a little child and lames him for life is 
no respecter of station or of people; and the 
great enemy of men's bodies, minds, and souls, 
is equally indifferent to the same. He would 
drag a Solomon from his position of purity and 
his place of prominence to evil conduct and 
disgraceful end, as willingly as he would de- 
ceive and destroy a plain, unlettered, and poor 
Judas Iscariot. He would maim forever the 
life of the sweetest sister with just as much 
relish as he would lead into iniquity the most 
vicious and criminally inclined man. 

Ballington Booth, who is an authority on 



RELATION OF STREET PREACHING 187 

such subjects, declares that the Salvation Army 
finds in the slums women who once moved in 
refined circles and exhibited unusual natural 
gifts. In one^s study of sociology he is often 
saddened to learn that not a few of the wrecks 
of men found among the submerged were born 
and bred in homes of opulence and refinement. 
The University often makes its contributions 
to the crowd who sleep on mission floors^ and 
sometimes royalty is found in the common pile 
of human wreckage. When they were exhum- 
ing at Pompeii they dug up a slab, and cleaning 
the dirt from the face discovered what seemed 
to be the features of a man. Carefully they 
cleared away every excretion from the stone, 
and lo, the face of one of the old kings ap- 
peared. But it was sadly marred, for when 
the cold slab was in plastic state a dog had 
walked across it and every foot-step had either 
mangled or obliterated some part of the noble 
face. One of the sad sights of the street is 
that of the marred men and women — women 
and men who have upon them the marks of the 
beast, marks which have defaced their kingli- 
ness and obliterated the features of royalty. 
When, therefore, one finds in the open air a 
Gospel Forum he finds the multitude which 
includes the men and women of direst need. 
The halt and the blind are also in the streets. 



188 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

We do not speak so much of those who have 
lost a limb, nor yet of those who must be led 
about by the hands of others; these are only 
a few of the halt and the blind. The men 
who were once successful in professions, who 
in business were once swifter than their com- 
petitors, whose accomplishments seemed only 
an earnest of coming honor, but who have met 
with adversity, and through money losses, or 
moral losses, or both, have come to limp and 
to lag behind in the race of life — the disheart- 
ened man, the defeated man — these make up 
the halt; and the streets are full of them. 

It is no wonder that Christ wept over Jeru- 
salem. The cry of anguish that escaped His 
lips as He looked on Jerusalem is felt by every 
Christian who deeply studies his own city. 
Our acquaintance may not be so large, we may 
not have entered so fully into the secret of 
suffering hearts, our sympathies may be regard- 
ed as comparatively shallow, yet, who is not 
afraid to sit down and think of his acquaint- 
ances? Think of the men who have failed in 
business, and lost their wealth; the men who 
have failed in their professions and taken 
forty-second rank when they had hoped to hold 
first; of the men who dream great projects 
but are never able to bring them to pass ; think 
of the men who have been thrown out of em- 



RELATION OF STREET PREACHING 189 

ployment, or else are compelled to accept posi- 
tions which do not bring a competence. Aye, 
these are the things that make us afraid. Just 
as a few years since we dreaded to read about 
the famine in India; just as we preferred not 
to look upon the pictures of the suffering, 
starving natives of that country ; so the average 
man shuts his eyes to the scenes of the city 
in which he lives. 

There are too many of our fellow-creatures 
who, like Jacob, when the sun rose upon him 
at Peniel, are halting upon the thigh. Yes, 
and there are many who, like Bartimaeus, are 
among the blind. They have lost their way, 
they are groping in the dark, they have found 
no hand to lead them out of danger; or worse 
still, they have felt no fear of the sin which 
they commit, nor of the Adversary whom they 
serve. Such is the street of the city. The 
Christian Church has too long covered its eyes 
from the vision. If we continue we may im- 
pose upon ourselves irremediable blindness. 
They tell that in the days of Rome a man 
who had been condemned by the law, escaped. 
In order to disguise himself he put a patch over 
one eye and kept it there for twelve years. 
Thinking then that the danger of recognition 
had passed he removed the patch. The sight 
of the eye was gone ! Under this enforced 



190 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

shielding it had died. God forbid that the 
Church which wears the name of Jesus Christ 
should shut her vision from painful scenes 
until her spiritual sight is destroyed ! 

It means something when our Christ utters 
the command, "Go out quickly into the streets 
and lanes of the city/' The commission is just 
as incumbent as that of evangelizing the world. 
It is a question indeed whether we shall go 
gospelizing the public or continue to speak only 
to that small fraction which we can coax within 
the walls of the church house. We find this 
statement in the Journal of the grand John 
Wesley : "I preached near the hospital to twice 
the people we should have had at the house. 
What marvel that the devil does not like the 
field preaching ! Neither do I ! I like a com- 
modious room, a soft cushion, a handsome pul- 
pit. But where is my zeal, if I do not trample 
all these under foot, in order to save one more 
soul?" 

THE MISSION TO THE STREETS. 

The very misery of the streets explains 
Christ's command, and our commission. The 
Lord of this parable is none other than Jesus 
Himself; and the servants are none other than 
those of us who have named His name. 
Through us, if ever at all, He must mitigate 
the misery of the streets. 



RELATION OF STREET PREACHING 191 

The first invitations to this feast are to 
eqtials and intimates. That is at once natural 
and right. No true foreign missionary spirit 
exists in a man who is not concerned for the 
salvation of his nation; no real disposition 
to save America is to be found with him who 
forgets his own State; there is no evangelist 
true to the State who forgets his own city. 
The city missionary who neglects the unsaved 
members of his own house is a hypocrite. The 
public takes no stock in the woman who pre- 
sides with grace at a foreign missionary circle, 
but whose home influence does not help her 
husband heavenward, or favorably affect her 
unregenerate children. God forbid that we 
should speak aught to decrease the interest 
in the heathen world; its very smallness is 
one of the sins of the church. God forbid that 
we should utter a word to detract from the 
motto "America for Christ"; our contributions 
for home missions ought to be increased many 
fold. But God forbid that we should forget 
that the Christian's first duty is to the man 
next to him. Andrew was a sample saint! 
"He first findeth his own brother Simon and 
saith unto him, We have found the Messias, 
and he brought him to Jesus,'' Philip did not 
forget his fast friend Nathaniel. Too much 
of our religion consists in what we call going 



192 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

to "divine service/^ but what is as a matter of 
fact "going to human rest/^ We go to easy 
pews and listen to a comfortable sermon. Wil- 
bur Crafts reports a man in Maine who com- 
plained, "It is this working between meals that 
is killing me"; but if our churches die it will 
be for the opposite reason. Their very lives 
depend upon their working between meals, and 
the work is at hand. 

The first mission of every man of us is to 
his own — the members of his own house — or of 
his circle of social friends. When Jesus healed 
the Gadarene he said, "Go home to thy friends 
and tell them how great things the Lord hath 
done for thee, and hath had compassion on 
thee." We must be rid of the notion that one 
has to enter the sanctuary and ascend a pul- 
pit before he can preach the Gospel. The pri- 
vate ministry of the Gospel is the sine qua non 
of the perennial revival. 

This mission is not to stop with one's own, 
it must extend to the needy. In the parable 
the first invitation was to friends, but the sec- 
ond invitation was to the poor, and the maimed, 
and the halt, and the blind — in a word, to the 
needy. 

It is useless to define "the needy.'' Living 
in a brown stone front is no sign that a man's 
heart is not hungry. If a man is a foreigner. 



RELATION OF STREET PREACHING 193 

and poor, tinctured with anarchistic tendencies, 
that is no proof that he is without an abiding 
sense of lack in his life. One of the great prob- 
lems of the present time — a pressing problem, 
a problem that must be rightly solved or the 
nations suffer — ^is this Christian social prob- 
lem of meeting, not the wants of men, but their 
needs — ^needa of body, needs of mind, needs of 
soul. The keenest, clearest thinkers of our age, 
such men as combine at once successful busi- 
ness ability with a sympathetic heart, are not 
satisfied with the present attitude or past ac- 
complishments of the churches of Jesus Christ. 
One of these wrote to a minister of the Gospel : 
"I have no quarrel with the church, but I have 
no relish for the praise or worship which ends 
with itself. It seems to me that the function 
of Christianity is to make the earthly condi- 
tions better.^^ Louis Albert Banks says: "We 
discuss with vigorous eloquence *How to Reach 
the Masses' and kindred topics, but that divine 
hungering and thirsting after souls, that sub- 
lime passion for souls which mastered Philip 
and sent him climbing into the chariot of the 
Eunuch; that drove Peter from the house-top 
of Simon, the tanner, to the house of Cornelius ; 
which made Paul and Silas and Barnabas 
flames of living fire, so that before the days of 
steam their own enthusiasm burned their way 



194 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

through nearly all the known world, has died 
out of these respectable and conservative gar- 
risons of righteousness." The average reader 
can determine for himself whether Banks is 
right or not. Some of us have reached the point 
where every charge against present-day profes- 
sion pushes us back to personal examination of 
motive and of method in reaching our fellow- 
men; and we have come to feel that a confes- 
sion of evident weakness, and an attempt to 
right them, is far better than counter charges, 
or recrimination. 

The needy should move us just as the halt and 
the blind move us, and whenever and wherever 
we see a man in need, in bodily need, in mental 
need, in spiritual need, suffering from debase- 
ment of the flesh, from false philosophies, from 
heart hunger, then Christ^s commission should 
so far command us, and so far include our needy 
brother as to cause us to attempt to give him 
"the Gospel of the Son of God." In that Gos- 
pel men see their bodies to be the temples of 
the Holy Ghost, their minds to be the instru- 
ments of the Spirit, and their souls to be the 
subject of infinite love and eternal growth. 
Let us go into the streets and seek them, and 
speak to them saving truth. 

This commission is still more far-reaching. 
It includes the neglected. When the servant 



RELATION OF STREET PREACHING 195 

came back from the streets and lanes with as 
many of the poor and the maimed and the halt 
and the blind as would come, he reported, '^And 
yet there is room/^ "The Lord said unto the 
servant. Go out into the highways and hedges 
and compel them to come in/' The expression 
''the highways and hedges'' is significant. There 
are the people that live off to one side of better 
society. They are the social outcasts. Have 
you not noticed that the commission to these 
was the most urgent one ? There was a kind in- 
vitation given to the social equals, a more press- 
ing one to the people in need, but the most in- 
sistent invitation was reserved for the neglected. 
The reason for this is not far to seek. Jesus 
Christ was the great Sociologist of the ages. 
If it be true that "never man spake like this 
man" it is still more true that never man 
thought as He thought. He went as deeply into 
all sociological questions as Diety itself could 
go, and His prescriptions for them will prove, 
at last, the all-wise and adequate ones. It is 
right to legislate on questions of labor and capi- 
tal; it is right to talk arbitration; it is right 
to effect compulsory education, but let the 
Christian never forget that the solution of the 
difficulties arising out of ignorance, out of 
prejudices, and out of oppression, are not so 
much with Congresses as in the Gospel of Jesus 



196 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

Christ. Just so long as New York City goes 
on with a population larger than Detroit, in 
which there are practically no Protestant 
churches; just so long as the Thirteenth Ward 
of Boston, with its thousands of souls, has 
scarce a Protestant Church, while the wealthier 
Back Bay Ward witnesses their multiplication; 
just so long as Euclid avenue, Cleveland, is 
crowded with sacred cathedrals and the sanctu- 
aries are moving away from the ever-increasing 
center; just so long as the city of Chicago re- 
tains a black hole of one hundred thousand in 
which only weaker missions work, the churches 
of Jesus Christ must be regarded as neglecting 
their Master^s commission. These centers per- 
meate the atmosphere with the skepticism 
which they breed. They produce anarchists 
who take as much pleasure in destruction of 
the church as they could find in the overthrow 
of the state. 

When, some time ago, three of the most 
prominent churches of Chicago, located on the 
very edge of its deserted, neglected section, 
were burned within three weeks, the very sus- 
picion of incendiarism emphasized the fact that 
they might be reaping a destruction for which 
more guilty sister churches had sown. No 
army ever beat a more shameful retreat than 
that which has characterized the so-called Army 



RELATION OF STREET PREACHING 197 

of the Cross, as presented in the Protestant 
Churches of America, who have moved from 
glutted centers into sparsely settled sections 
where was the wake of wealth. We maintain 
that a properly equipped building, a vigorous 
preaching of the Gospel will call a crowd to 
the very section of the city where theaters flour- 
ish seven nights in the week, and saloons hold 
great companies twenty out of every twenty- 
four hours. But if there be some vacant pews 
inside the sanctuary, then carry your pulpit out- 
side, and almost any kind of preaching, with the 
aid of organ and singers, can collect an audience 
many times larger than that which commonly 
rustles its silks in the suburban church. 

THE MESSAGE TO THE STREETS. 

Every follower of the Nazarene is favored 
in the message which has been put into his 
mouth. It is his high privilege to call men 
to a feast. There are few more attractive terms 
than "feast.'' Go to a Southern barbecue and 
watch the people when the master of ceremonies 
announces "Dinner is ready." There is a rush- 
ing response. In cultivated Boston we saw the 
representatives of one of the most honored de- 
nominations, on their way to dine, so crowd Me- 
chanics' Hall as to endanger the more feeble 
people who were attempting to press their way 



198 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

to a plate. But no feast of body is comparable 
to this which Christ has spread. The man who 
goes out to proclaim it will always find in the 
streets some who are hungry for it, and who are 
also sensible of their starving condition. It 
is a mistake to suppose that the crowds are 
rejecting the Gospel. On the contrary, the 
churches are neglecting the crowds. There are 
not many men who hear the Gospel with any 
regularity and reject it. There are thousands 
and tens of thousands in every city who never 
hear it. We have erected our commodious 
building, employed an eloquent preacher and 
hired a competent, or incompetent sexton, 
and suppose that with this our whole duty 
is discharged. When the house is not filled we 
blame the folks outside and defend our speech 
by calling attention to the preparation we have 
made for them. But what has that to do with 
the Great Commission? The words of Jesus 
were never directed to the unconverted, calling 
them to the sanctuary; they were addressed 
to disciples, sending them into the streets and 
into the world. It was a blessed epoch for the 
church when the members at Jerusalem were 
scattered abroad and went ever3rwhere preach- 
ing the Word. It will be a more blessed epoch 
if ever the professed followers of the Nazarene 
scatter themselves on the same mission. 



RELATION OF STREET PREACHING 199 

What cliiirches could accomplish if their 
members were consecrated is evident in what 
has already come to pass. There is no other 
institution which compares with the church in 
calling together crowds who come not for social 
pastime, nor because compelled, but of their 
own will. In the Gospel God is giving His 
best and many so understand it. Jt is, there- 
fore, all the more incumbent on the churches 
to spread that proclamation. How often the 
coming of some famous man calls unchurched 
people to the sanctuary; and how often also 
some of these same people are caught by the 
Gospel and their lives yielded to God. The pop- 
ularity of the speaker may account for their hear- 
ing the Gospel, but the power of the Gospel alone 
accounts for their salvation. Why should the 
less famous disciple leave the unregenerate pop- 
ulace to such a precarious event as the possible 
coming of some popular preacher ? Why should 
he not make more sure for these the word of 
witness, by watching, even while he walks the 
streets, for an opportunity to tell the good news 
of redemption? Some millenniums ago Moses 
uttered a wish which finds repetition in the 
heart of every man who has been put into the 
ministry by God's Spirit : "Would God that the 
Lord's people were prophets, every one." 

Do we shrink from the sacrifice of street 



200 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

preaching? Is our pride opposed to such pro- 
cedure? Then how much we need to sit again 
at the feet of the great Master, until He has 
taught us to follow Him in His daily walks; 
until He has shown us how to work, and in our 
hours of rest to recline upon His bosom until 
His very spirit has permeated us and made sac- 
rifice a privilege ! 

If, for any reason, we feel utterly incompetent 
to undertake this commission to the streets, what 
about the means with which God has blessed us, 
and the offerings by which we could send to 
that same surging crowd a substitute? After 
the battle of Petersburg a church in Phila- 
delphia received word that two or three thou- 
sand men were wounded and bleeding and were 
without sufficient attention. Dr. Talmage, ad- 
dressing the people, said: "I will not make 
any appeal. There are two or three thousand 
men bleeding to death at Petersburg. Pass the 
plate!" That day women stripped the rings 
from their fingers and the jewels from their 
necks and cast them in that the wounded might 
have attendants and the dying be nursed back 
to life again. 

The Christian man who studies the streets 
will rightly interpret the spirit of Jesus, who, 
when He looked upon the multitude, was filled 
with compassion for them. With his Saviour 



RELATION OF STREET PREACHING 201 

he will see that the poor are there, the maimed, 
the halt, the blind ; yea, there are the wounded, 
the bleeding, the dying! The cushioned pew 
may be a fit place to pray for a perennial re- 
vival, but the man who prays in the sanctuary 
and declines, or fails to seek the souls in his 
home, in his office, in the shop, and in the 
streets, has prayed in vain. 



THE EELATION OF PEW EENTALS TO 
THE PERENNIAL EEVIVAL. 



CHAPTEE X. 

THE RELATION OF PEW RENTALS TO 
THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL. 

The caption of this chapter reveals no new 
subject. The custom of pew rents was unknown 
to the early church; but it has so long been in 
vogue that the man who pleads for the free- 
pew system seems, to some at least, to set him- 
self in opposition to ecclesiastical order. Let it 
be remembered, however, that since the time it 
came into practice there have been protestants. 
It is doubtful if these protestants have ever 
been so large and influential as now. And while 
they are yet in the minority, their cause waxes 
and must eventually win. To aid in hastening 
that day this chapter is devoted. 

In pleading for the free pew we shall at- 
tempt to make statements to which dissent will 
be difficult. 

THE FREE PEV7 IS FRATERNAL. 

It represents the higher sentiment of human- 
ity. We do not believe in the "Gospel of Hu- 
manity.^' Humanity is a sinner and not a 
Saviour. And yet in this sinner there are sen- 
timents which bespeak his former unfallen 

205 



206 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

state, some finer feelings clinging to him, com- 
ing down from the day when humanity was sin- 
less; and among them is this feeling of fellow- 
ship as between man and man without respect 
to riches, social standing, breeding or birth. 
You remember that Charles Kingsley expressed 
this sentiment in writing, when, under the nom 
de plume of Parson Lot, he said : "I was look- 
ing in at the windows of a splendid curiosity 
shop in Oxford street, at a case of humming 
birds. I was gloating over the beauty of those 
feathered jewels, and then wondering what was 
the meaning, what was the use of it all ? Why 
those exquisite little creatures should have been 
hidden for ages, in all their splendors of ruby 
and emerald and gold, in the South American 
forests, breeding and fluttering and dying that 
some dozen out of all those millions might be 
brought over here to astonish the eyes of men? 
And as I asked myself, 'Why were all these 
boundless varieties, these treasures of unseen 
beauty created? My brain grew dizzy between 
pleasure and thought; and, as always happens 
when one is most innocently delighted, I turned 
*to share the joy,' as Wadsworth says, and next 
to me stood a huge, brawny coal heaver in his 
shovel hat, and white stockings and high-lows, 
gazing at the humming birds as earnestly as my- 
self. As I turned he turned and I saw a bright 



THE RELATION OF PEW RENTALS 207 

manly face with a broad, soot-grimed forehead, 
from under which a pair of keen flashing eyes 
gleamed wondering, smiling sympathy into 
mine. In that moment we felt ourselves friends. 
If we had been Frenchmen we should, I sup- 
pose, have rushed into each other's arms and 
'fraternized' upon the spot. As we were a pair 
of dumb, awkward Englishmen, we only gazed 
a half minute, staring into each other's eyes^ 
with a delightful feeling of understanding each 
other, and then burst out both at once with, 
'Isn't that beautiful?' 'Well, that is!' And 
then both turned back again to stare at our 
humming birds. I never felt more thoroughly 
than at that minute (though, thank God, I had 
often felt it before) that all men were brothers; 
that fraternity and equality were not mere po- 
litical doctrines, but blessed God-ordained facts ; 
that the party walls of rank and fashion and 
money were but a paper prison of our own 
making, which we might break through any 
moment by a single, hearty and kindly feeling; 
that the one spirit of God was given without re- 
spect of persons ; that the beautiful things were 
beautiful alike to the coal heaver and the par- 
son; and that before the wondrous works of 
God the rich and the poor might meet together 
and feel that whatever the coat or the creed 
may be, 'A man's a man for a' that,' and one 



208 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

Lord the maker of them all." If there is any 
one place in all the world where the man of 
means and the man without means, the man of 
learning and the unlearned man should meet, 
touch elbows, and feel what Kingsley wrote, 
namely that "all men are brothers," it ought to 
be in God^s House. The free pew, therefore, is 
an absolute essential to such fellowship. 

It recognizes the term "in Christ." The 
truest fraternity is not to be found with the 
ungodly. It is not to be expected that Mam- 
mon will claim kin with Poverty; or Civiliza- 
tion consent to associate with Heathenism. The 
Church of God, however, should bring even these 
extremes into fellowship. For, as Paul writes 
to the Galatians: "Ye are all the children of 
God by faith in Jesus Christ. For as many of 
you as have been baptized into Christ have put 
on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, 
there is neither bond nor free, there is neither 
male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ 
Jesus." Such was the mind of the Master. 
John Watson says: "Jesus realized that the 
tie which binds men together in life is not 
forged in the intellect, but in the heart. Love 
is the first, and the last, and the strongest bond 
in experience. It conquers distance, outlives all 
changes, bears the strain of the most diverse 
opinions. . . . Unity is possible wherever 



THE RELATION OF PEW RENTALS 209 

the current of love runs from Christ^s heart 
through human hearts and back to Christ 
again/' But who can imagine that Christ's 
prayer for His disciples, that they all may be 
one as He and His Father are one, will ever be 
answered while the rented-pew system of 
church administration remains. The story 
is told that Eobert Ingersoll once went to 
church and the wealthy man into whose pew 
they had put him stopped at the end and waited 
for Ingersoll to come out, that he might seat 
his family. But Ingersoll sat still. After sit- 
ting down in evident anger, he wrote a note and 
passed it over to the Pope of Infidelity, saying : 
''Sir, I pay $500 for this pew." To this Inger- 
soll instantly scribbled the reply: "Cheap 
enough ; it is a good pew V We doubt the story 
because it involves IngersolFs presence at 
church, but it well illustrates a point. We of- 
ten hear it said that the man who pays for a 
pew has a better right in it than he who pays 
nothing. There are, however, two answers to 
this claim. First of all, will any man admit 
that his pew rental is a business bargain of so 
much money for so much comfort? If so, 
where does Christ's gift come in, and where is 
the man's sacrifice to the cause ? Again, is it 
Christian to stand on one's rights? We teach 
our children that brothers ought not always to 



210 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

stand on their rights, but to show the spirit of 
self-sacrifice in the interests of others. Should 
the blood-relation behave better than the blood- 
bought? If so, all our Christianity is in vain, 
and all our boasted brotherhood but show bills 
published for the purpose of deceiving the peo- 
ple into supposing us to be what we are not. 
Wherever you find a thorough-going Christian, 
a man who reminds one of the Master, you will 
find one who will share his pew, and, if need be, 
surrender it altogether, for Christ's sake. Would 
that this spirit were universal, and that we 
might sing truthfully the words of Louis M. 
Waterman : 

"O Wondrous Brotherhood ! 

Sweet bondage of the heart — 
Thy golden chains no power 

Hath might to tear apart! 
O Miracle of Love! 

What marvel thou hast done: 
Ten thousand thousand lives 

In Christ shall be as one! 

O Happy Fellowship ! 

Thine ecstasy the Earth 
May never match in all 

Her palaces of mirth! 
In thee, O Love of Christ, 

Such strange, sweet joy belongs 
As one might know who feels 

The thrill of angel songs ! 



THE RELATION OF PEW RENTALS 211 

O Unity Supreme! 

Of Father, Spirit, Son — 
In kindred mystery 

"With Jesus we are one. 
Grant us, O Triune God; 

A fellowship like thine — 
A peace — pure, fathomless; 

A joy — serene, divine!" 

The free pew also anticipates the fellowship 
of heaven. The men who expect to live to- 
gether hereafter ought to touch elbows, at least, 
here and now. You remember Paul wrote to 
the Ephesians concerning the Father how in the 
"fulness of times he might gather together in 
one all things in Christ, both which are in 
heaven, and which are on earth.^^ Certainly 
some closer fellowship here will make way for 
a sweeter fellowship there. Some time ago 
James Farrington went from Iowa Falls, Iowa, 
to New Brunswick, N. J., to visit his brother 
Patrick. They had not seen each other since 
1853, and the meeting was one of such joy that 
the New York newspapers made mention of it, 
saying the neighbors in New Brunswick had 
never looked upon a more affecting scene than 
the meeting of these two men. Why such dem- 
onstrations of love ? Why such overflow of sen- 
timent? There is but one answer, they were 
brothers. Forty-seven years before they had 
dwelt together and learned to love one another. 



212 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

If we are to meet in the hereafter who questions 
that our meeting will be sweeter if on earth we 
have loved the fellowship of the saints, that fel- 
lowship in Christ which means the obliteration 
of every barrier, the equality of children of a 
common Father? Just so long as we are with- 
out the free pew — an institution which puts the 
high and the low, the rich and the poor, on a 
common basis in the House of God — ^we are 
without the conditions that conserve the fra- 
ternity which anticipates the fellowship of 
Heaven. 

THE FREE PEW IS SCRIPTURAL. 

It issues a common invitation to all classes. 
It makes good Solomon^s proverb : "The rich 
and poor meet together : the Lord is the maker 
of them all.^^ In the opinion of the Apostle 
James, poverty was no reason for relegating a 
man to the corner, behind a post, or under a 
foot stool, any more than riches was a reason 
for giving a man the position of the best pew 
in the house. James uttered some very straight 
words to the ushers of his hour. It would be 
well to have them embossed and tacked up at 
the head of the aisles in every church, that they 
might be constantly before the usher: "My 
brethren, have not the faith of our Lord Jesus 
Christ, the Lord of glory, with respect of per- 
sons. For if there come unto your assembly a 



THE RELATION OF PEW RENTALS 213 

man with a gold ring, in goodly apparel, and 
there come in also a poor man in vile raiment: 
and ye have respect to him that weareth the 
gay clothing, and say unto him, Sit thou here 
in a good place ; and say to the poor, Stand thou 
there, or sit here under my footstool: are ye 
not then partial in yourselves, and are become 
judges of evil thoughts?" James also assigned 
a reason for his words ; "Hath not God chosen 
the poor of this world rich in faith, and heirs 
of the kingdom which he hath promised to them 
that love him?" 

You have heard the fable of the kind-hearted 
king, who, while hunting in a forest, found a 
blind orphaned boy living there like a beast. 
The boy's pitiable state touched the king's heart 
and he took him to his home and taught him all 
that could be learned by the blind. When he 
reached his twenty-first year, the king, who 
was also a great physician, restored his sight, 
and leading him into the palace, presented him 
to his nobles as his own son, commanding all to 
give him their honor and love. What lord then 
dare treat with indifference this adopted child? 
What brother in the house could despise or mal- 
treat him without offending royalty ? How can 
any Christian man imagine himself above that 
one in the house of God, no matter how poor 
he is, or how neglected, when God has adopted 



214 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

him and introduced him into His household of 
faith? He is a child of the KING; worthy not 
only to share the best synagogue, if it be his 
pleasure, but he is to be privileged to sit with 
the Lamb Himself upon the throne. 

We are not pleading for a social communism. 
We are not asking the rich to make their social 
friends of those in whom they find no delight. 
Such a course might not be profitable, since 
there would be little of pleasure to either party. 
But, except the Bible be wrong, and Christ ut- 
terly misunderstood, the Church of God pre- 
sents the one place, and the Christianity of 
Jesus Christ the one plane, where men should 
meet and forget their differences of station, of 
cloth and, despising the blood in their own 
veins, remember that they are alike bought by 
the blood of Jesus Christ, and in that blood are 
made brethren. Dr. Deems is right in declar- 
ing that if any difference is made in escorting 
people to seats let it be in favor of the poor. 
Not because they are poor, but because they are 
more sensitive, and therefore in need of the 
more cordial welcome. 

Christ was exceedingly careful to warn the 
Pharisees at this point. One day He was invited 
to a Pharisee's house to dinner and "He put 
forth a parable to those which were bidden, 
when he marked how they chose out the chief 



THE RELATION OF PEW RENTALS 215 

rooms ; saying unto them, When thon art bidden 
of any man to a wedding, sit not down in the 
highest room; lest a more honorable man than 
thou be bidden of him; and he that bade thee 
and him come and say to thee, Give this man 
place; and thon begin with shame to take the 
lowest room. But when thou art bidden, go 
and sit in the lowest room; that when he that 
bade thee cometh, he may say unto thee. Friend, 
go up higher: then shalt thou have worship in 
the presence of them that sit at meat with thee. 
For whosoever exalteth himself shall be abased ; 
and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted/^ 
Let us not forget God^s custom in choosing 
men. When he wanted a leader for His people 
He took Moses, the despised Hebrew babe, and 
exalted him. When he needed a Premier in 
Egypt He found that person in Joseph — the 
hated brother. When He wanted a king for the 
throne of Israel He passed by those of splendid 
stature and selected David, the ruddy youth of 
the field. Henry Yan Dyke truly remarks of 
His conduct : "He has made apostles and saints 
out of men and women that the world would 
have thrown away as rubbish ; Avitness Peter, the 
weak and wayward; Mary Magdalene, the de- 
filed; Zaccheus, the worldly; Thomas, the de- 
spondent; Paul, the persecutor and blas- 
phemer." Who can imagine these early church 



216 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

people making a distinction between the apos- 
tles of the faith because they were poor, and set- 
ting up chief seats for Nicodemus, Joseph and 
Lazarus, Mary and Martha because they were 
well to do ? It has been often affirmed, and we 
fear with some occasion, that one can determine 
the relative financial standing of the members 
of a church by studying the map of the ground 
floor of the building. But no one could have 
done that in the old First Church at Jerusa- 
lem. 

Again, the free pew is scriptural because it 
keeps the church door open to Jesus Christ. 
When Christ had finished His epistles to the 
Seven Churches of Asia He concluded by say- 
ing : '^Behold, I stand at the door, and knock : 
if any man hear my voice, and open the door, 
I will come in to him, and will sup with him, 
and he with me.^' To some of us this seems 
clearly to refer to His second appearance which 
is "without sin unto salvation.^^ But those who 
interpret it as His attitude toward the local 
institution are often guilty of having practically 
excluded Him by a pew rental past His means. 
Do you not recall in that wondrous dream en- 
titled "How Christ Came to Church," the 
good man said: "Though there had been 
misgivings and questionings about our sys- 
tem of pew rentals . . . the matter had 



THE RELATION OF PEW RENTALS 217 

not come home to me as a really serious ques- 
tion till Christ came to church on that morn- 
ing. Judging by His dress and bearing, it was 
evident that were He to become a regular at' 
tendant, He could not afford the best pew in 
the house : and this was distressing to think of, 
since I knew from Scripture that He has long 
since been accorded the highest place in heaven, 
'angels and authorities and powers being made 
subject unto Him\" And is not Jesus Christ 
a regular attendant at church? If not, God 
pity the church from which He is absent, and 
cause us to remember that even touching that 
church He says : '"^Behold, I stand at the door 
and knock." 

Any fair interpretation of the Scripture is 
authority for the thought that any humble man 
who looks at the Church of Jesus Christ with 
wistful eyes and is afraid to enter because its 
pews are rented and he has not the price, is none 
other than Jesus Christ standing without and 
waiting, waiting to be invited to share, or rather, 
to have a place in His Father^s House. In Vic- 
tor Hugo's "Les Miserables" there is a para- 
graph which ought to profit every church in the 
land. His good Bishop — ^who is the true Chris- 
tion of the volume — addresses Jean Yaljean, the 
ex-convict, saying : "You need not tell me who 
you are. This is not my house ; it is the house 



218 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

of Christ. It does not ask any comer whether 
he has a name, but whether he has an affliction. 
You are suffering; you are hungry and thirsty; 
■ be welcome. And do not thank me ; do not tell 
me that I take you into my house. This is the 
home of no man, except him who needs an asy- 
lum. I tell you, who are a traveler, that you 
are more at home here than I ; whatever is here 
is yours." Our boasted twentieth century and 
Protestant religion is much of it put to positive 
shame by a speech like that. 

One of the most popular books of recent times 
is Sheldon^s "In His Steps." Who can ever 
forget the scene in that First Church when 
Henry Maxwell finished his sermon on the text, 
"For even hereunto were ye called: because 
Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an ex- 
ample, that ye should follow his steps?" The 
quartette had risen to sing, "All for Jesus, all 
my being's ransomed power," when the con- 
gregation was startled by a voice, and the next 
instant a pale-faced fellow is making his way 
from his place under the gallery to the open 
space in front of the pulpit and asking the 
privilege of speaking. Then he told his story of 
no work, of having lost his wife, of having sent 
his little girl to stay with a printer's family 
until he could support her. As he went on tell- 
ing how he had to grapple with poverty, how 



THE RELATION OF PEW RENTALS 219 

he had seen his wife die of starvation, he said : 
"I heard some people singing at a church prayer 
meeting the other night : 

All for Jesus! All for Jesus! 

All my being's ransomed pow'rs : 
All my thoughts and words and doings, 

All my days and all my hours I 

and I kept wondering, as I sat on the steps out- 
side what they meant by it? It seems to me 
there is an awful lot of trouble in the world 
that somehow would not exist if all the people 
who sing such songs went and lived them out. 
I suppose I do not understand, but what would 
Jesus do? What do you mean by following in 
His steps? It seems to me sometimes as if the 
people in the city churches had good clothes 
and nice houses to live in and money to spend 
for luxuries and could go away on summer vaca- 
tions and all that, while people outside of the 
churches, thousands of them, I mean, walk the 
streets for jobs or die in tenement houses, and 
never have a piano or a picture in the house, 
and grow up in misery and drunkeness and 
sin/' At that point he grew paler still, and 
lurching forward he fell heavily to the floor. 
The services were at an end, but the question 
remained in Henry MaxwelFs mind, "What 
would Jesus do''; and he turned himself about 
to follow the Master's steps as never before. 



220 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

You remember the revolutions it wrought. Who 
can raise this question, "What would Jesus 
do/' on the subject of pew rentals without 
knowing instantly the answer ? If Jesus would 
make them free do you not shut Him out if you 
put a price upon them ? We need to read often 
the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew and re- 
member that in the judgment we shall stand or 
fall according to our treatment of His lowly 
friends, for inasmuch as we have done unto 
the least of these, Christ's brethren, we have 
done unto Him. 

THE FREE PEW IS SUCCESSFUL. 

It elicits the best financial support. Wher- 
ever this plan has been adopted in the church 
whose spiritual life makes its adoption a neces- 
sity, it has solved many financial problems. In 
illustration think of Spurgeon's Tabernacle; 
the Tremont Temple, Boston; Grace Temple, 
Philadelphia. These are three of the largest 
institutions of the respective cities, and yet 
they have existed without pew rentals. Even 
where the pew rentals exist nominally they are 
ordinarily not sufiicient for the support of the 
church and the balance must be made good by 
free will offerings. Some time ago the Eam's 
Horn had an article upon this subject in which 
Mr. Charles H. Mills, pastor of the Pilgrim 
Congregational Church, Cleveland, Ohio, told 



THE RELATION OF PEW RENTALS 221 

their experience of nine years with a free 
church. In that time its membership had 
grown from three hundred to eight hundred and 
forty-eight. Its gifts had been most generous 
at home and abroad. It had supported reading 
room, gymnasium, recreation rooms, daily kin- 
dergarten, sewing school, young men^s club, a 
course of educational lectures and concerts. At 
Owensboro, Ky., some years ago, Dr. Hale began 
in the Court House with four hundred people 
and not a cent of property. These had come 
out of the leading church in the city, a division 
having occurred on the question of the churches 
duty to amusements, distilling of liquors, oper- 
ating saloons, etc. At the end of four years 
they had a membership of eleven hundred, had 
built a house seating at least twenty-five hun- 
dred in the very heart of the city. They have 
contributed largely to missions at home and 
abroad and their entire work had been accom- 
plished apart from pew rentals. When that 
grand man, George Mueller, was called from 
Teignmouth to Bristol, after days of earnest 
consideration of the call he replied: "I will 
accept the call on the condition that the pew 
rents shall be abolished.^' The eminent suc- 
cess of his work is known the world around, and 
we believe is praised in heaven. 

Again, the free pew gives the greater satis- 



222 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

faction. The objection urged to it that it breaks 
up family sittings is not evidenced. He would 
be a blundering usher indeed who paid no at- 
tention to having a family sit together, and as 
far as compatible with the interests of others, 
in the same place every Sunday. Such an ar- 
rangement does provide against offending the 
poor, putting up a barrier between the labor- 
ing classes, and worst of all, relegating to 
the gallery hundreds of men and women 
who once expended thousands upon God^s 
cause, but who through poverty have been 
left too little to pay the price of a pew. In the 
"Little Masterpieces of American Wit and 
Humor/^ a story is told of Mr. Dickson, a 
colored barber in a large New England town. 
One of his customers said: "I believe you are 
connected with the church in Elm street?" 
"No, sah; not at all." "What, are you not a 
member of the African Church?" "Not dis 
year, sah." "When, and why did you leave their 
communion?" "Well, I'll tell you, sah; it was 
just like dis. I jined de church in good fait'; 
I gave ten dollars toward the stated Gospil de 
first year, and de church people call me ^Brud- 
der Dickson'; de secon' year my business not 
so good, and I gib only five dollars. That year 
the people call me ^Mr. Dickson.' Well, sah, 
de third year I feel berry poor ; had sickness in 



THE RELATION OF PEW RENTALS 223 

my fambly; I didn^t gib nofim' for preachin'. 
Well, sah, arter dat they call me *dat old nigger 
Dickson' and I left 'em/' Christ can approve 
of no condition in a church that would ever 
make it possible for a man, who in the days of 
financial success, sacrificed grandly for the 
cause, to surrender his seat* in the House of 
God because in his becoming less able to pay 
the rental a more prosperous brother purchases 
it away from him. Think of a church in which 
the pews are put up and auctioned ofi to the 
highest bidder ! Yet with this very act we have 
been familiar. 

Of transcendent importance is the fact that 
the free pew is more successful in soul-winning. 
Let no man imagine that to declare pews free 
insures the regeneration of those who sit in 
them. A dead church may declare for what it 
will and nothing comes of the declaration. But 
when the church is moved by the Spirit of 
Jesus Christ, who so loved the world that He 
gave His life for it, and in that spirit are will- 
ing to make sacrifice of sittings that souls may 
be reached, God gives such a church success in 
soul-winning. There is no sanctuary so attract- 
ive to the unsaved as the one wherein they find 
themselves loved, and wherein the people are 
willing to put themselves out that they may 
make their acquaintance, and instruct them in 



224 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

the knowledge of the Lord. A cordial hand- 
shake has been the beginning of many a man's 
salvation, and the sharing of a pew with the 
stranger presents the very best opportunity of 
speaking to him about his soul. Pleasant as 
it is, therefore, for a man to sit with his family 
on the Sabbath, and desirable also, he should 
willingly sacrifice this privilege if by so doing 
he can reach an unsaved man. Think of what 
it means to him if you lead him to the Lamb 
of God! Think of what it may mean to his 
house ! Aye, think of what it means to heaven ! 
The human mind has never yet imagined what 
it means to God when the recording angel writes 
down a new name in the Lamb's Book of Life. 
Do you not recall how when the steamer At- 
lantic struck ground and went down the mes- 
sage of destruction was telegraphed over 
the land ? On that ill-fated steamer was a man 
from Detroit, Mich., and from him was re- 
ceived a message which contained but a single 
word, and yet it thrilled thousands and thou- 
sands of the land, for that word was "Saved" ! 
Oh the joy in his own house ! Oh the rejoicing 
among his friends and acquaintances there! 
That is the word that thrills heaven as no other 
word known to men or angels can ! Throw open 
your doors then, and with outstretched hands 
and smiling faces make men welcome in the 



THE RELATION OF PEW RENTALS 225 

House of God, and then they may find the way 
to the heart of God. 

The free pew sustains a definite relation to 
the perennial revival. 



THE RELATION OF BIBLE STUDY TO 
THE PEEENNIAL EEVIVAL. 



CHAPTER XL 

THE EELATION OF BIBLE STUDY TO 
THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL. 

There are two ways of rendering John 5 : 39 
— the King James version : "Search the Scrip- 
tures, for in them ye think ye have eternal life ; 
and they are they which testify of me"; and 
the revised version: "Ye search the Scriptures 
because ye think that in them ye have eternal 
life; and these are they which bare witness of 
me." A study of the original text compels the 
conviction that the King James version has 
much in its favor. The words of Jesus are 
more likely a command than an affirmation, 
and so furnish a starting point for what shall 
be said in this chapter. 

It may be a relief to some people to know 
that just now that command of Jesus has no 
formidable opponent. The late Pope did the 
extraordinary thing of blessing Bible study. 
At the very time when Romanists in Chili were 
engaged in burning Bibles, the great "Head of 
the Church" beside the Tiber was pronouncing 
his blessing upon Scripture study, calling for 
at least a quarter of an hour each day for this 
Bpecial exercise. To the Protestant world this 

229 



230 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

announcement brought special joy, since they 
knew the privilege — the unspeakable spiritual 
privilege — which it would bring to that great 
body of people, who, by Pope and Priests, have 
been kept in crass ignorance of God's revealed 
will. To Eomanist it is both gladness and 
grace since such a privilege contains the prom- 
ise of that intelligent and spiritual progress 
which has characterized Bible students in all 
ages. Some of us are little concerned, from a 
personal standpoint, as to what the Pope says 
upon such a subject, since we do not receive our 
orders from him, or regard with any special 
esteem his boast of authority. But it is of the 
utmost concern that our Lord Himself — ^the 
souPs true Master — should say, "Search the 
Scriptures,'^ for He spake with authority. His 
every wish ought to be our will; His every 
Word is the Christian's clear command. It is 
to be supposed also that our Saviour under- 
stood the intimate relation between searching 
the Scriptures and all those blessings expressed 
by the biblical words "salvation" and "sancti- 
fication." 

In order to elucidate our theme, we propose 
three questions: 

WHAT ARE THE SCRIPTURES? 

Joseph Parker says, "As for defining what is 
meant by Hhe Word of God,' we must remem- 



THE RELATION OF BIBLE STUDY 231 

ber that there is no definition. No man can 
define God, or truth, or life, or love; they are 
original and undefinable terms." True, and 
yet there are some things said in the Scrip- 
tures concerning themselves that go far toward 
the answering of this question. As a man 
knows his own motive better than his neigh- 
bor can; as the rays of light tell the story of 
the sun; so the Holy Spirit — ^the author of the 
Word — can answer, and, we believe, has an- 
swered the question, "What are the Scrip- 
tures?" Then let us be silent while He speaks 
to us concerning the Scriptures by its own 
sacred texts. In other words, what say they of 
themselves ? 

Tliey claim to he God's inspired Word. "All 
Scripture is given by inspiration of God," or, 
"Every Scripture — God-inspired." There is 
a vast difference of opinion as to what this 
means. But when one hears God promise to 
be with Moses' "mouth" and hears Moses affirm 
that he gave to the people only that which God 
had given him; when one hears David saying, 
"The Spirit of the Lord spake by me and His 
word was in my tongue"; when one hears 
Isaiah say that the angel cleansed his lips with 
a coal, that the words of God might be taken 
upon them; he becomes convinced as to what 
the word of God means. When one listens to 



232 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

the major prophets and the minor prophets 
affirming, "The Word of the Lord came unto 
ns/' his conviction of inspiration deepens. 
When Paul attributes the very words of the 
Scriptures to the Spirit, remarking, "As the 
Holy Ghost saith. Today if ye will hear His 
voice, etc/^ (Heb. 3:7), and when Peter affirms, 
"Prophecy came not in old times by the will 
of man; but holy men of God spake as they 
were moved by the Holy Ghost*'; he knows at 
least the opinion of the most prominent apos- 
tles. But when Jesus adds His testimony that 
"God spake by the mouth of His holy 
prophets,'* (Luke, 1:70) it would seem past 
dispute. For our part we join heartily with 
Charles Spurgeon in saying, "The Bible is the 
writing of the living God. Each letter was 
penned with an Almighty finger, each word in 
it dropped from the everlasting lips; each 
sentence was dictated by the Holy Spirit. Al- 
beit Moses was employed to write the histories 
with his fiery pen, God guided that pen. It 
may be that David touched his harp, and let 
sweet psalms of melody drop from his fingers, 
but God moved his hands over the living 
strings of his golden harp. Solomon sang 
canticles of love, and gave forth words of con- 
summate wisdom, but God directed his lips, 
and made the preacher eloquent. If I follow 



THE RELATION OF BIBLE STUDY 233 

the thundering Nahum, when the horses plough 
the waters; or Habakkuk, when he sees the 
tents of Cushan in affliction ; if I read Malachi, 
when the earth is burning like an oven; if I 
turn to the smooth page of John, who tells of 
love; or the rugged chapters of Peter, who 
speaks of fire devouring God's enemies; if I 
turn aside to Jude, who launches forth anathe- 
mas upon the foes of God, everywhere I find 
God speaking; it is God's voice, not man's; 
the words are God's words; the words of the 
Eternal, the Invisible, the Almighty, the Je- 
hovah of ages. This Bible is God's Bible; and 
when I see it I seem to hear a voice springing 
up from it, saying, 'I am the book of God; 
study my page, for I was penned by God; love 
me, for He is my author, and you will see Him 
visible and manifest everywhere.' " 

They claim to he God's power of salvation. 
It was of the Old Testament Paul wrote to 
Timothy, reminding him of the fact that when 
from a child he had known the Holy Scrip- 
tures, ^^which," Paul adds, "are able to make 
you wise unto salvation." (2 Tim. 3:15.) It 
was of the Old Testament Christ must have 
been speaking when He said, "Search the 
Scriptures, for in them ye think ye have eter- 
nal life; and they are they which testify of 
me." It was of His own preaching He re- 



234 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

marked, 'The words that I speak unto you, 
they are spirit and they are life." (Jno. 6 :63.) 
On another occasion He declares, "Verily, ver- 
ily I say unto you, if a man keep my sa3dngs he 
shall never see death/^ Paul, also, in Romans 
1 :17, writes regarding that portion of the 
Scriptures known as "the Gospel": "I am not 
ashamed of the Gospel of Christ, for it is the 
power of God unto salvation to everyone that 
believeth." When the faithful few are asked 
by their Lord whether they also would turn 
back from following Him, Peter responds, 
"Lord, to whom shall we go? thou hast the 
words of eternal life." (Jno. 6:68.) 

TTiey also claim to he God's eternal revela^ 
tion. The Master Himself said, "The Scrip- 
tures can not be broken." (Jno. 10.35.) And 
again, "Verily I say unto you, until heaven and 
earth pass, one jot or tittle shall in no wise 
pass from the law." He reaffirmed, therefore, 
the language of Psalms, 117:2, "The truth of 
the Lord endureth forever." We meet not a 
few people who seem to agree with Eollo Ogden 
that the battle has gone against the Bible as 
the world's only great literature. Some would 
even advance beyond his position and claim 
that the battle has gone against it as inspired 
literature. It is not long since Dr. Lyman 
Abbott was delighting the satellites of a certain 



THE RELATION OF BIBLE STUDY 235 

great university by declaring the old theory of 
Bible inspiration doomed. But Theodore 
Parker is dead ; and the Bible lives ! Why be 
greatly concerned for Abbott^s speech? This 
Book has been able to make good its claim of 
"an enduring revelation" ; the plain people who 
have familiarized themselves with its pages, 
and the humble students among our great 
scholars, have no fear that it is about to pass 
away. With Dr. John Cummings they remem- 
ber that "The empire of the Caesars is gone; 
the legions of Eome are moldering in the dust ; 
the avalanches that Napoleon hurled upon 
Europe have melted away; the pride of the 
Pharaohs is fallen; the pyramids they raised 
to be their tombs are sinking every day in the 
desert sands; Tyre is a rock for bleaching 
fishermen's nets; Sidon has scarcely left a rock 
behind; but the Word of God still survives. 
All things which threatened to extinguish it 
have only aided it; and it proves every day 
how transient is the noblest monument that 
man can build, how enduring is the least word 
that God has spoken. Tradition has dug for it 
a grave; intolerance has lighted for it many 
a faggot; many a Judas has betrayed it with a 
kiss ; many a Peter has denied it with an oath ; 
many a Demas has forsaken it; but the Word 
of God still ePidures." 



236 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

This prepares us only the better for our sec- 
ond question: 

WHY SEARCH THE SCRIPTURES? 

One would not think of attempting all the 
possible answers to this question. Let us make 
mention of a few of the more important ones. 

First, search the Scriptures, because they 
are the world's best literature. Even the critics 
would confess that Moses had no match; that 
David was the greatest literary light of his 
times, competent to pass upon all the litera- 
ture then existing. David affirms concerning 
the Scriptures, with which he was familiar, 
that they had made him wiser than his enemies, 
that they gave him more understanding than 
his teachers, and endued him with wisdom 
above the ancients. (Ps. 119:98-100.) Of 
recent men of literature, who is more highly 
regarded than Euskin? Think of his words: 
"I opened my oldest Bible just now . . . yellow 
with age, and flexible, but not unclean, with 
much use, except that the lower corners of the 
pages at chapter seven of the First Book of 
Kings, and chapter eight of Deuteronomy are 
worn somewhat thin and dark, the learning of 
these two chapters have caused me much pain. 
My mother's list of chapters with which, every 
syllable learned accurately, she established my 
soul in life, has fallen out of it, as follows: 



THE RELATION OF BIBLE STUDY 237 

'Exodus 15 and 20; 2 Samuel 1, 5, 17 to the 
end. 1 Kings 8; Psalms 23, 32, 90, 103, 112, 
119, 139; Proverbs 2, 3, 8, 12; Isaiah 58; 
Matthew 5, 6, 7; Acts 26; 1 Corinthians 13, 
15; James 4; Eevelation 5 and 6. And truly 
though I have picked up the elements of a 
little further knowledge ... in mathematics, 
meteorology, and the like, in after life, and I 
owe not a little to the teachings of many 
people, this maternal installation of my mind 
in that property of chapters I count very con- 
fidently the most precious and, on the whole, 
the one essential part of my education/* 

It is one of those blunders that public senti- 
ment will not much longer brook that the Bible 
has been cast out of public institutions of learn- 
ing through the influence of Rome. If the late 
Pope's enunciation has not made its restoration 
possible, the very demands of scholarship will 
eventually reinstate that volume which Walter 
Scott describes "the only Book" ; and of which 
Theodore Parker was compelled to admit, "It 
is the purest fertilizing stream that ever flowed 
through our desert world.'* Huxley, the ag- 
nostic, you will remember said, "It is indis- 
pensable to a sound ethical education." And 
better men have more lately declared that it 
is absolutely necessary to the first attainments 
of literary knowledge. When one compares the 



238 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

Bible with other Books^ he appreciates the oc- 
casion of Lorimer's language: "All others are 
as stars in comparison with the sun, as the 
cold luster of the pole in comparison with the 
brilliancy of the tropics, as the opaque white- 
ness of the pearl in comparison with the trans- 
parent beauty of the diamond." 

Again, search the Scriptures, because they 
are worthy of more than a superficial study. 
There are not a few people today, who, mainly 
for social reasons, skim over every new volume, 
and skip through every monthly received at 
the Public Library. Their purpose is to shine 
in society and insure for themselves a cheap 
reputation. No one seriously objects, since, 
after all, many of these books and magazine 
articles are not worthy deep research and seri- 
ous meditation. But who shall say the Scrip- 
tures ought to be so regarded when Jesus said, 
"Search the Scriptures." He emphasized their 
value! The woman with the lighted candle 
searched her house because the lost coin was a 
valuable one; Laban searched Jacob's tent be- 
cause he believed his gold to be there; the 
Berean brethren rightly estimated the Old 
Testament, and so when they heard Paul and 
Silas in their synagogue, "They received the 
word with all readiness of mind and searched 
the Scriptures daily whether those things were 



THE RELATION OF BIBLE STUDY 239 

so/' Paul put his approval upon this method 
of Scripture reading when he wrote to Tim- 
othy, "Give diligence to show thyself approved 
unto God, a workman that needeth not to be 
ashamed, handling aright the word of truth.'' 
(R. V.) 

If we are to have the wisdom of the Word, it 
will come only as a result of diligent search. 
One who had watched Eobert M'Cheyne read 
his Bible declared that he pored over its pages 
just exactly as a money-hunter might search 
through sands known to contain gold nuggets, 
and ever and anon brought up from the depths 
of Scripture some marvelous find which seemed 
to delight his soul, as the Kohinoor rejoiced 
the heart of the finder. 

Search the Scriptures also, because they 
throw light on life's pathway. The character- 
istic of the 119th Psalm is its many references 
to the intrinsic worth of the Word. You re- 
call how the author says, "Thy word is a lamp 
unto my feet and a light unto my path." And 
again, "The entrance of thy words giveth light. 
It giveth understanding to the simple." Other 
books may make contribution to the solution of 
life's problems, but this Book provides a per- 
fect explanation of the same. As Dr. Behrends 
remarked, "It is light. It is the sun of the 
soul, ministering illumination and inspiration. 



240 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

It is represented as the fixed and immovable 
center of Divine truth, 'forever settled in 
heaven. It provides the basis of an infallible 
certainty; just as the sun, by its invisible but 
constant^ and efficient energy secures the stabil- 
ity of the planetary system/ " 

Those who have read the life of Gordon will 
recall what he said concerning the sufficiency of 
the Scriptures to accomplish Christian char- 
acter. In speaking of the Puritan family 
whence Gordon was descended, Gordon says: 
"We recall especially one old grandmother, hid 
away on a back farm with but two books, the 
Bible and Bunyan, who tended and nurtured 
a spiritual life fairly efflorescent in its devo- 
tion, its sweetness, its humility. In extreme 
age interest in the Lord^s work never dimmed. 
Often did her grandson, coming back to the 
old home in the summer time, marvel at the 
depths, the richness, the fulness of this hidden 
life.^^ And yet there was no occasion for his 
marvel when one remembers what springs of 
life are open in this sacred volume. 

Again, the Scriptures declare the light of 
(mother world. It is the only revelation we 
have of the life to come; the only picture of 
that heaven which is to be our home. Man's 
longing for another existence is an argument 
for his immortality ; but the Sacred Scriptures 



THE RELATION OF BIBLE STUDY 241 

stand alone in their revelation of that life. 
Jesus Christ also impressed the men and wo- 
men, with whom He was in intimate associa- 
tion, that He was fresh from heaven; when 
He spake of it, it was as a traveler talks of 
the house from which he had come but yester- 
day, to the joy and love of which He would 
return tomorrow. To Jesus heaven was "my 
Father's house." The "mansions" were the 
work of His own hands, pictured for the con- 
solation and light of His own sadness, and 
of the disciples' suffering. Those words were 
in perfect accord with all the Scriptures have 
said concerning the same. The outlines of 
the Old Testament are embodied in the New. 
We look not only on 'Tiouses not made with 
hands," on mansions — a multitude, but on "the 
Holy City coming down from God out of 
heaven" — a city that lieth foursquare; a city 
that exceeds in splendor the wildest flights of 
the human imagination, and in size the com- 
bined cities of ten thousand thousand such 
worlds as ours. Such a city the Scriptures de- 
clare to be our eventual home. If a man will 
keenly read a will, and earnestly study its every 
sentence to discover what his inheritance is, 
why should a people, knowing the instrument 
which describes and bequeaths to them ever- 
lasting possession, neglect its study? 



242 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

Within a few years past the magazines of the 
land have made Helen Keller well known to 
the whole wide world. As men have read the 
writings of this youthful genius they have not 
been able to understand how one shut out from 
the whole world by deafness, dumbness, and 
blindness, having no medium of communication 
save through the touch, could ever have 
thought and written as she thinks and writes. 
I often wonder how much of her wisdom may 
come down directly from above as God^s com- 
pensation for lost faculties. These beautiful 
words she spake many years ago : '^You know 
I have lost my loving friend. Bishop Brooks. 
Oh, it is very hard to bear this great sorrow — 
hard to believe that I shall never more hold his 
gentle hand while he tells me about God and 
love and goodness ! Oh, his beautiful words ! 
They come back to me with sweet, new mean- 
ing. He once said to me, 'Helen, dear child, — 
that is what he always called me, — Ve must 
trust our Heavenly Father always, and look 
beyond our present pain and disappointment 
with a hopeful smile.' And in the midst of 
my sorrow I seem to hear his glad voice say, 
'Helen, you SHALL see me again in that 
beautiful world we used to talk about in my 
study. Let not your heart be troubled.' Then 
heaven seems very near, since a tender, loving 



THE RELATION OF BIBLE STUDY 243 

friend awaits us there/^ Yes, the grass wither- 
eth; this world passeth, but Ood^s heaven is, 
and His heaven abides. 

WHO SHALL SEARCH THE SCRIPTURES? 

This question could be answered in the 
language of the small boy's petition, "every- 
body in this world." Such an answer would 
save us the trouble of specifying, but also deny 
us the advantage of the specifying process. 
There are three or four classes upon whose 
study of the Scriptures the perennial revival 
is dependent. 

First of all, those who profess to teach their 
truths. When Jesus said, "Search the Scrip- 
tures" He was face to face with Pharisees who 
prided themselves upon their knowledge of the 
Word. Hillel had died in the days of Christ's 
boyhood, and the Jews boasted a flaming knowl- 
edge of the Scriptures as a result of his influ- 
ence. They reckoned some of those who were 
then members of the Sanhedrin as the bulwarks 
of their wisdom and the glory of their law. 
They had a common saying, "He that has the 
words of the law has eternal life." And yet 
Christ called upon them to "search the Scrip- 
tures" that they might do better than merely 
know parts of it by rote; that they might see 
its hidden meaning and understand its spiritual 
significance ! 



244 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

The reputed teachers of this hour are equally 
in need of the Master's word. We do not ob- 
ject that the theological seminaries of this 
country glorify Greek, and laud Latin; that 
they lay stress upon the preparation and de- 
livery of discourse; that they demand hard 
study, for history, sacred and profane, and 
emphasize theology — dogmatic and systematic; 
but we would have them insist upon the earnest 
study of God's Word in one's mother tongue. 
It is but a short time since Dr. Strong, of 
Eochester, speaking of the young theological 
students of that seminary, said, "Almost all 
of them are college graduates, and they are 
men of good, natural intelligence. Yet I have 
been pained to find in many of these cases that 
their relation of experience makes no mention 
either of sin or of Christ. The two foci of 
the Christian ellipse they seem to be ignorant 
of." What is this but a result of indifference 
to Scripture study on the part of teachers? 
Those at whose feet these young men have sat, 
in the churches whence they came, have too 
often essayed to be critics of the Word rather 
than instructors in the same. This has come 
about not only because the assumption of the 
attitude of the critic is supposed by superficial 
thinkers to be equal with scholarship, but be- 
cause the preacher himself finds it easier to 



THE RELATION OF BIBLE STUDY 246 

rehash the opinions of these so-called learned 
men than to sound the depths and explore the 
heights of the sacred Word. But the future 
of the church in its relations to the perennial 
revival is further mortgaged by the fact that 
all theological seminaries are not correcting, 
for their students, this sad deficiency. It is a 
dark day for the Bible, and that evangelism 
which is ever dependent upon the same, when 
theological seminaries adopt as a textbook an 
'^Outline of Clar¥s Theology'' under the mis- 
nomer "An Outline of Christian Theology/^ 
It is in vain to instruct men in the specula- 
tions of the uninspired, and expect them in 
turn to teach the people the Holy Scriptures. 
If Jesus were back in the world today and were 
preparing afresh His disciples for their work 
He would have equal occasion to emphasize the 
words "Search the Scriptures.^^ Paul, in writ- 
ing to the Galatians, said: "Let him that is 
taught in the word communicate unto him that 
teacheth in all good things.^^ The minister is 
the one man concerning whom inquirers ought 
to be compelled to say, as Nicodemus did to his 
Master: "We know Thou art a teacher come 
from God." Joshua 1 :8 contains the motto 
for the theological seminary: "This book of 
the law shall not depart out of thy mouth; 
but thou shalt meditate therein day and night. 



246 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

that thou mayest observe to do according to 
all that is written therein: for then thou shalt 
make thy way prosperous, and then thou shalt 
have good success." Is it any marvel that 
many a modern product of these schools is fail- 
ing when Sunday after Sunday he stands be- 
fore his people and speaks what he calls a ser- 
mon, which, when it appears in print, is found 
to contain but a single reference to the Scrip- 
ture, and that the text? 

F. B. Meyer says, "I shall never forget see- 
ing Charles Studd early one November morn- 
ing, clothed in flannels to protect him from 
the cold, and rejoicing that the Lord had 
awakened him at four a.m. to study the Word. 
He told me then that it was his custom to 
trust the Lord to call him and enable him to 
rise." It is little wonder that Studd succeeded 
in showing men the way of life when he gave 
so much of his time to searching the Scrip- 
tures. Would-be teachers of these truths 
should do one of two things; either familiar- 
ize themselves with them, work their way into 
the wealth of them, look down into the depths 
of them, or else step aside and let those fill 
their places who are willing to pay the price 
for Scripture knowledge — ^the price that Paul 
named to Timothy. 

Every saved man should study the Scrip- 



THE RELATION OF BIBLE STUDY 247 

tures. The revival for which we pray depends 
in no small measure upon Scripture-instructed 
laymen. Philip was able quickly to lead the 
Ethiopian to the Lord, and speedily into the 
baptismal waters, because he was so well ac- 
quainted with the Book. It is doubtful 
whether his ability to so preach that "the 
people with one accord gave heed unto those 
things which he spake'' so that Samaria en- 
joyed a great revival, is to be regarded beyond 
that which he displayed when he sat beside 
the Ethiopian, and, by the fifty-third chapter 
of Isaiah, showed him the way of salvation. 
To raise up a generation of such men is to 
Gospelize the age. Bible classes, instructed by 
masters of the Word, and Bible Training 
Schools, presided over by men who know the 
Book— these are the demands of the hour for 
our Master's cause! 

And yet again, the sinner should study the 
Scriptures. The very difficulty of the present- 
day revival, temporary or perennial, is in that 
lack of Bible knowledge which is coming more 
and more to characterize the unregenerate in 
the community. Our fathers preached to the 
descendants of the Puritans — a Bible-in- 
structed public. Their sermons were not, 
therefore, delivered in an unknown tongue. 
Their unregenerate auditors were able to say 



248 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

concerning the sermons, saturated with Scrip- 
ture references, what the people at Pentecost 
remarked, "We hear every man in our own 
language wherein we were born." With no 
Bible in the Public Schools; with no family 
altar in a majority of so-called Christian 
homes; with critics of the Word in so many 
pulpits, the prophecy of Amos has approached 
literal fulfillment: "Behold, the days come, 
saith the Lord Jehovah, that I will send a 
famine in the land, not a famine of bread, 
nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words 
of Jehovah. And they shall wander from sea 
to sea, and from the north even to the east; 
they shall run to and fro to seek the word of 
Jehovah, and shall not find it." 

Go into your great universities and put a few 
questions of the simplest and most straight- 
forward kind to the students and you will soon 
find what they know of the Scriptures ; go into 
your high schools, and into the graded schools 
and repeat the same, and it will be easy to 
realize why men are so hard to reach ; why even 
the young seem no longer susceptible to the 
truths of God's Word. Dr. L. W. Munhall is 
authority for the following: "In an eighth- 
grade room in a Minneapolis public school, 
where the pupils were reading Evangeline, 
they were asked to tell what the lines 'And 



THE RELATION OF BIBLE STUDY 249 

crowed the cock with the self-same voice that in 
ages of old had startled Peter^ meant. Twenty- 
two answers were submitted and only one was 
correct/' "A freshman class in English in an 
Indiana college was recently assigned 'The 
Book of Job' as the subject for an essay. Dur- 
ing the following week the librarian had sev- 
eral calls for the ^Book of Job/ the applicant 
in each instance stating that he could not find 
it at any of the bookstores." ''In the North- 
western University, a Methodist school, ninety- 
six men and women, mostly from the higher 
classes, were examined. Thirty-six could not 
define the Pentateuch. Forty did not know 
the book of Jude was in the New Testament. 
Thirty-three could not name the Patriarchs 
of the Old Testament. Fifty-one could not 
name one of the Judges. Forty-nine could not 
name three kings of Israel. Forty-four could 
not name three prophets. Twenty could not 
write a beatitude. Sixty-five could not write 
a verse from Eomans. For judges they named 
Solomon, Jeremiah, Daniel and Lazarus. For 
the prophets they named Matthew, Luke, 
Herod and Ananias." 

It was easy to lead the Ethiopian to the 
Lord Christ because he was a student of the 
Scriptures. Philip found him immersed in 
the Gospel of Isaiah. To bring back Scrip- 



250 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

ture study is to make soul-winning easy. Dr. 
Behrends has sagely remarked: "Salvation is 
the burden of Scripture. Everything else is 
subordinate. Scripture discloses the nature, 
the necessity, the source, the conditions, the 
means, the present and future fruits of eternal 
life. I am not to go to them for chronology, 
nor for science, nor even for my history, but 
to be made wise unto salvation. That is the 
path upon which their light was made and 
meant to shine. And upon that path no other 
light does shine.'^ The problem, then, in the 
perennial revival, is in great part, at least, the 
problem of bringing the whole public back to 
an earnest study of the Book. 



THE EELATIOK OF GIVING TO THE 
PEEENNIAL KEVIVAL. 



CHAPTEK XII. 

THE RELATION" OF GIVING TO THE 
PERENNIAL REVIVAL. 

A mine is only "worked out" when it jdelds 
unprofitable ore, or no ore. The second chapter 
of Acts, into which we have descended so often 
in the course of this volume, has not yet failed 
to repay our pains. Going into it again we find 
it ready to yield valuable contribution to the 
subject "Giving and the Perennial Revival," for 
therein we read "All that believed were together 
and had all things common ; and sold their pos- 
sessions and goods, and parted them to all men 
as any man had need. . . . And the Lord 
added to them day by day those that were being 
saved." It is not claimed that the contributions 
of these Christians are related to the accessions 
to the church as cause to effect, but no one will 
question that giving, on the part of God's peo- 
ple, was one of the factors in this continuous 
revival; perhaps all will concede that it was a 
most important one. In such an opinion we 
are confirmed by a further study in Acts. In 
the fourth chapter of this volume it is recorded : 
"The multitude of them that believed were of 
one heart and soul; and not one of them said 

253 



254 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

that aught of the things which he possessed was 
his own; but they had all things common. . 
. . For as many as were possessors of lands 
or houses sold them and brought the price of 
the things that were sold and laid them at the 
apostles' feet; and distribution was made unto 
each according as any one had need. . . . 
And believers were the more added to the Lord, 
multitudes both of men and women.'' 

The sample features of this first New Testa- 
ment Church profoundly impress all good stu- 
dents of the Scriptures ; and to pass over the re- 
lation that giving there sustained to the peren- 
nial revival would be to ignore the evident mind 
of the Holy Ghost. In the elaboration of this 
theme let us think of The Grace of Giving, The 
Gospel of Giving, and The God of Eevivals. 

THE GKACE OF GIVING. 

Inspiration names '^giving*' a grace. Paul, in 
his second epistle to the Corinthians (8:7), 
says to the members of that church: "As ye 
abound in everything, in faith, and utterance, 
and knowledge, and in all earnestness, and in 
your love to us, see that ye abound in this grace 
also." "This grace" is the "liberality" which 
had characterized them in their offerings, con- 
cerning which he bore them witness that "ac- 
cording to their power . . . yea, and be- 
yond their power, they gave of their own ac- 



THE RELATION OF GIVING 255 

cord.'^ Wlien writing to the Eomans, the same 
apostle mentions "giving'' as worthy a place 
with "prophecy/' "ministry/' "teaching/' "ex- 
horting/' saying "He that giveth let him do it 
with liberality." (12:8.) If all graces foimd 
their highest expression in the character of 
Christ let it be remembered that chief among 
them was this grace of giving. "For ye know 
the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though 
He was rich, yet for your sakes He became poor, 
that ye through His poverty might become 
rich." (2 Cor. 8:9.) "The grace" of our 
Lord Jesus Christ is the capital grace of every 
Christian who possesses the same. 

This grace originates in regeneration. It can 
not be claimed that all unregenerate men are 
stingy souls; nor yet that all regenerate men 
are generous spirits, but it can be successfully 
shown that all Spirit-begotten men are quick- 
ened in benevolence by the new birth. When 
Paul writes, regarding the liberality of the 
Corinthians, he assigns it not to a nature, nat- 
urally generous ; on the contrary he reveals the 
relation of the new birth to benevolence by 
saying: "First they gave their own selves to 
the Lord, and to us by the will of God." (2 
Cor. 8:5.) It matters little how loud one may 
be in his professions of loyalty to Christ, only 
let it be known that he is penurious, and the 



256 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

public, in the church and out, will question his 
conversion. Familiar as that public is with 
how Christ surrendered up all — all honor, all 
riches, all comfort — ^to complete His great gift 
to men, it demands a kindred spirit on the part 
of the professed follower of the Nazarene, and 
is likely to twit the covetous, and greedy, with 
the text, "If any man hath not the Spirit of 
Christ he is none of His/' Evidently Ananias 
and Sapphira were members of the old First 
Church at Jerusalem, but when they attempted 
to make a show of Christianity by professing 
great liberality, while practicing, in secret, com- 
mercial economy, they fell under the condemna- 
tion of their fellow Christians, and more serious 
still, under the condemnation of the Holy 
Spirit. On his own confession Zaccheus must 
have been both close-fisted and oppressive before 
his regeneration. When, however, he received 
the Lord Jesus, generosity displaced greed and 
he gave back to the world four times as much 
as he had ever taken from it by false accusation. 
There are a number of Scriptural tests of one's 
regeneration. John, in his first epistle, makes 
mention of three or four of these, and of them 
this one is prominent, "Hereby know we love, 
because He laid down His life for us, and we 
ought to lay down our lives for the brethren. 
But whoso hath the world's goods, and behold- 



THE RELATION OF GIVING 257 

eth his brother in need, and shutteth up his 
compassion from him, how doth the love of God 
abide in him? My little children let us not 
love in word, neither with the tongue, but in 
deed and truth. Hereby shall we know that we 
are of the truth and shall assure our heart be- 
fore Him/' (3:16-19.) 

This grace is accentuated hy the enduement 
of the Spirit. There were many disciples be- 
fore the day of Pentecost; liberal giving, how- 
ever, appeared only after the Holy Ghost had 
come upon them. We may discuss the question 
as to whether a stingy man has ever been saved, 
but no one ever thought of discussing the ques- 
tion as to whether a stingy man had ever been 
Spirit-filled. In fact, there is such an incongru- 
ity between the practice of stinginess and the 
infilling of the Spirit that few parsimonious 
souls have ever had the temerity to make such 
a profession. Men commonly believe that 
George Miiller was Spirit-filled, and ground 
that opinion, in part surely, upon his splendid 
liberality. Among other evidences that John 
Wesley was Spirit-filled is the fact that he 
spent no more when his income was $3,500 per 
annum than when he received but $250. The 
increase went wholly to the service of the Lord. 
None dispute that Lady Huntington was Spirit- 
filled, because her $500,000 upon the altar of 



258 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

God was good evidence, while the sale of her 
jewels that she might erect chapels for the poor, 
the sacrifice of her residence, and the dismissal 
of her liveried servants, that God might get the 
more, were indisputable arguments. The songs 
of love to her Lord, sung by Frances Ridley 
Havergal, have about them the very breath of 
the Spirit-filled, but when she makes the coup- 
let 

"Take my silver and my gold, 
Not a mite would I withhold," 

more than sentiment, by packing up every piece 
of silver and gold, including a jewel cabinet fit 
for a countess, dispatching all to the church 
missionary society to be sold and invested in 
foreign missions, and adds, "I never packed a 
box with such pleasure," she provided a 
proof that will persuade most men. Any grace 
worthy to be named "the grace" of our Lord 
Jesus Christ, and to be assiduously cultivated 
by the Holy Ghost, should be ardently coveted 
by all Christians. 

Let us seek, therefore, to discover the Di- 
vinely appointed method of its impartation. 

THE GOSPEL OF GIVING. 

There is a "Gospel of giving." In this use 
of the word "Gospel" we do not employ the old 
sense "good news or tidings," but the more 
modern thought of "any doctrine concerning 



THE RELATION OF GIVING 259 

human welfare that is agitated as of great im- 
portance/' 

The importance of giving has been pro^ 
claimed by prophet, apostle and Lord. Yea, it 
antedates all of these and was first voiced by 
God — ^the Father. An offering was required 
from Cain and Abel. The first fruits of the 
flock were not asked then because there were 
either poor or heathen in the world, but rather 
for the good of the givers. Tithing was not 
born with the Levitical system, as men com- 
monly imagine. Long before Moses saw the 
light Jacob was saying to God: If you "will 
be with me, and will keep me in this way that 
I go, and will give me bread to eat, and rai- 
ment to put on, so that I come again to my 
father's house in peace, then shall the Lord be 
my God, and this stone which I have set for a 
pillar shall be God's house, and of all that thou 
shalt give me, I will surely give the tenth unto 
thee." (Gen. 28:20-22.) Solomon, the wise 
man, said: "There is that scattereth, and yet 
increaseth; and there is that withholdeth more 
than is meet, but it tendeth to poverty. The 
liberal soul shall be made fat; and he that 
watereth shall be watered also himself." (Prov. 
11 :24-25.) The last prophet of the Old Testa- 
ment gives eloquent voice to this same gospel 
of giving. After Malachi's charge to the pec- 



260 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

pie of having robbed God, he becomes the 
mouthpiece of Jehovah to voice the words: 
"Bring ye all the tithes into the storehouse that 
there may be meat in my house, and prove me 
now herewith, saith the Lord of Hosts, if I 
will not open you the windows of heaven, and 
pour you out a blessing that there shall not be 
room enough to receive it/' 

Some of the things which the Apostle Paul 
said upon this subject we have already studied. 
But the language of our Lord is never to be 
forgotten in this connection. "Give and it shall 
be given unto you, good measure, pressed down, 
shaken together, running over.'' (Luke 6 :38.) 
If the example of the ancients, the letter of the 
law, the plain language of prophet, the appeal 
of apostle, and the call of Christ can combine 
to properly impress any great truth, the Gospel 
of giving should be familiar to God's men and 
women everywhere. 

This Gospel provides for proportionate giv- 
ing. In the Old Testament economy the rich 
brought the bullock, while the poor were ac- 
cepted with the turtle dove, or the bit of flour. 
The New Testament law is, "Every one . . 
. according as God has prospered him." It is 
often said there is no rule but has its excep- 
tions. There were no exceptions under this 
rule. The poor could bring an ephah of flour. 



THE RELATION OF GIVING 261 

but not a word about those who could bring 
nothing. The widow at Zarepta was in ex- 
treme poverty, and yet had she declined to give, 
she would have only further impoverished her- 
self by missing the Divine favor. The expen- 
sive offering that Mary brought for Christ^s 
anointing, the sweet spices of Joseph, must 
have been approved of God, but the most honor- 
able mention was reserved for the widow who 
cast into the treasury two mites, all she had. 
God never intended to convert the world to 
righteousness through the magnanimity of the 
rich. If he had Jairus, Zaccheus, Joseph and 
Nicodemus would have belonged to the aposto- 
late, while Peter, James and John would have 
been left with their nets. God meant to make 
the rich and poor co-operate in this colossal 
work, and, by the gifts of both, pave the way 
for the coming King. If there is any one place 
at which the rich and poor ought to meet to- 
gether in recognition of the Lord as the Maker 
of them all, it is before the contribution box, 
since it is as serious for the one as for the other 
to forget that "every good and every perfect 
gift cometh down from above, from the Father 
of lights.'' 

This Gospel is linked to the most sacred 
events of Christianity. When John would re- 
mind us of our obligation to give, he speaks 



262 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

of that God who so loved us as to send his Son 
to be the propitiation for our sins. When Paul 
would stimulate us in this grace he refers to 
the same Infinite sacrifice. Our day is charac- 
terized by committees on systematic beneficence. 
Many of these are appointed on public occa- 
sions, appear once or twice during the year to 
speak before inspiring audiences, and then, at 
the annual gathering, render an eloquent report 
on "How Men Should Give." The best com- 
mittee on Systematic Beneficence would be com- 
posed of not more than two, the individual 
Christian and the Holy Spirit. The Christian 
should attend that meeting to get counsel and 
the Holy Spirit would attend it to give the 
same ; and every meeting of this sort would be 
followed by conduct so improved as to demon- 
strate the value of the commission. It was after 
some such a session as this that Phelps could 
say: 

"Savior, thy dying love 

Thou gavest me, 
Nor should I aught withhold, 

Dear Lord, from thee: 
In love my soul would bow. 
My heart fulfill its vow, 
Some offering bring thee now, 

Something for Thee. 

THE GOD OP REVIVALS. 

Having called attention to The Grace of Giv- 
ing and the Gospel of Giving, it remains to lay 



THE RELATION OF GIVING 263 

further emphasis upon the relation which giv- 
ing sustains to the perennial revival. 

With the command to ''give'' God associates 
a covenant of revival. If, in the Old Testa- 
ment, those who honored the Lord with their 
"substance and the first fruits of all their in- 
crease'^ found their "barns filled with plenty" 
and their presses "bursting out with new wine'* 
the Lord changed the form of the promise, and 
by the pen of the last of His prophets offered 
in exchange for tithes an open heaven. (Mai. 
3:10.) The words of Jesus to the rich young 
ruler, "If thou wouldst be perfect, go sell that 
thou hast and give to the poor, and thou shalt 
have treasure in heaven,^' have bothered many. 
Men ask "What did Jesus mean here?" Why 
should He lay such unusual exactions upon this 
youth? Why ask him to make so great a sac- 
rifice? The exactions were not unusual. The 
sacrifice was not great when compared with the 
suggested reward. Jesus was saying the same 
thing to this young man that Jehovah said to 
the people of Malachi's time — Give up your 
gold, which perishes with the using, and take in 
exchange immortal souls, saved through its sac- 
rifice. What is "the treasure in heaven" for 
which any Christian may look forward? Not 
the mansions that await him^ nor yet the pre- 
cious stones which shall greet his eyes as he 



264 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

treads the golden streets of the Celestial City. 
The same Master who spoke to the rich young 
ruler of the treasure in heaven employs the 
parable of the evil steward to teach us what he 
means by that treasure, saying of him who had 
made friends out of the mammon of unright- 
eousness, that they might receive him into their 
houses when he should be put out of his stew- 
ardship, "So I say unto you, make to yourselves 
friends by means of the mammon of unright- 
eousness; that when it shall fail, they may re- 
ceive you into the eternal tabernacles/' If the 
princess who heard others boasting their dia- 
monds could point to her two children saying, 
'^Dehold my jewels,'^ shall we not gladly expend 
our wealth to convert sinners into children of 
the King that we may find our silver and our 
gold in the far city, where it will come back to 
us, as the gold of Silas Marner returned to him, 
in the radiant forms who shall fill our eternal 
home and our immortal hearts with everlasting 

joy- 

God Imks the salvation of sinners with the 
sacrifices of the saints. We have seen how the 
Scriptures affirm this fact. We have beheld 
how the New Testament Church illustrated it. 
The church of our century has demonstrated 
this relation again and again. Theodore Cuy- 
ler, in his little volume, "How to Be a Pastor/' 



THE RELATION OF GIVING 265 

records the outbreaking of revival upon re- 
vival in the midst of his people when there had 
been no special plans looking to these refresh- 
ings. In 1866 such a work of grace was upon 
them that three hundred and twenty souls were 
added to their membership, one hundred of 
them heads of families. Men wondered at these 
results; but when one reads the record of this 
church all surprise is set aside, and he sees the 
relation between Christian giving and church 
growth. In the thirty years of Cuyler's pas- 
torate his people contributed $700,000 for the 
maintenance of the sanctuary, its worship and 
work, and gave $640,000 more to missionary 
effort at home and abroad. There is a bit of 
history which many public speakers have em- 
ployed, and yet one worthy repetition here. It 
is the history of a revival in the Clarendon 
Street Church, Boston. Dr. Gordon tells how 
they had prayed for a revival in his church 
and it had not come. By and by the date 
for the annual offering to foreign missions 
was approaching, and in speaking of it the 
pastor astonished his congregation by ex- 
pressing the hope that they would contrib- 
ute that year $10,000 for that one cause. It 
seemed an impossible thing. There were only 
a few wealthy men in the church and they were 
not given to large sacrifices. But when the of- 



266 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

fering was all in $20,000 had been contributed 
and that without having privately solicited a 
man. In writing of it Gordon said: "It was 
simply a great impulse of the Spirit, and the 
astonishment of all still continues. Now is com- 
ing a gracious ingathering of souls." We have 
long prayed for the opening of the windows of 
heaven, and for a blessing above room to receive 
it. Our prayers will be answered when we bring 
our tithes into God's storehouse. Campbell 
Morgan, in his little volume entitled "Where- 
in," speaks of that little couplet, often sung in 
conventions, 

"My all is on the altar, 
I am waiting for the fire." 

and says, "It is an absolute absurdity. Nobody 
ever waited for the fire when "all" was on the 
altar. Let a man sing, if he like 

"A part is on the altar, 
I am waiting for the fire." 

I do not know that he ought to waste the time 
in singing even that, but bestir himself to get 
the other portion on the altar. That is his 
business. When you and I put our all upon the 
altar the fire falls directly . . . God's con- 
ditions being fulfilled, God's promises never 
halt." Bring in the tithes, that is our part — 
and the windows will open, that is God's prom- 
ise. 



THE PATRON EVANGELIST OF THE 
PERENNIAL REVIVAL. 



CHAPTEE XII I. 

THE PATRON EVANGELIST OF THE 
PERENNIAL REVIVAL. 

If one proposes to present a modern name in 
this connection, Dwight L. Moody is without 
a peer. Jesus once said of John the Baptist: 
^^What went ye out for to see? A prophet? 
Yea, I say unto you, and more than a prophet." 
The same remark might have been made to any 
group of men who had been at Moody's feet. 
His greatness grew upon the public mind for 
more than twenty years, and yet his full meas- 
ure was never taken until after his death. 

When you walk in the thick forest and find 
there some mighty oak you may stand beside 
it to admire its splendid proportions; you may 
look at its height and feel how it pushes itself 
toward heaven, but every woodsman will tell 
you that its real proportions can be appreciated 
only after it has fallen to the ground. Some 
years ago, while the Northfield Conference was 
in session. Dr. Gordon, who was in charge, re- 
ceived a telegram from Mr. Moody saying that 
he could not be present, but that he had three 
helpers, Meyers, Pierson, and Pentecost, who 
would take his place, and he added an encourag- 

269 



270 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

ing Scripture reference. Dr. Gordon immediate- 
ly replied, "See 1 Cor. 16 :17"--"I am glad of 
the coming of Stephanas and Fortunatus and 
Achaicus: for that which was lacking on your 
part they have supplied." Truly he was equal 
to many men, a Napoleon for generalship, a 
Whitfield for eloquence, a Wesley for fervor, 
and a Spurgeon for direct speech and effective 
organization. And now that he has gone, no 
wonder the ministers, missionaries, laymen and 
even men of the world have been saying one to 
another: "Know ye not that a prince and a 
great man is fallen this day in Israel ?" 

I believe, therefore, it would be a blessing to 
every congregation in the land to listen to a 
discourse of thirty minutes or more about this 
modern and mighty prophet of God. In order 
to understand this evangelist one needs to trace 
the history of his life. 

First of all we are interested in 

THE BIRTH OF THE BOY. 

It was on February 5th, 1837, that Dwight 
Moody opened his eyes to the light, in historic 
Northfield. When his mother carried him out- 
side the humble house, his eyes rested upon the 
beautiful mountain ranges that rise on either 
side of the picturesque Connecticut River. The 
hill country is a good place in which to be born. 



THE PATRON EVANGELIST 271 

It is more easy to grow a giant when he has the 
mountains to climb, the forests, brooks, and 
rivers to look upon. Outdoor life is an educa- 
tion at once to muscle and mind ; and doubtless 
the spirit of man, by communication with na- 
ture in such forms, is lifted into communion 
with nature^s God, for, as Walter Scott says in 
"Guy Mannering,^' "Who can presume to an- 
alyze that inexplicable feeling which binds a 
person, born in a mountainous country, to his 
native hills?" 

This boy was of Puritan parentage. Hia 
father and mother were of the good old New 
England stock. While his father, Edwin Moody, 
was removed by death when Dwight was four 
years of age, he was by no means orphaned 
thereby, for Betsy Holten Moody was equal to 
playing the part of both parents. The fact that 
she was left in poverty and charged with the 
care and support of eleven children did not re- 
duce her stout heart to despair. On the con- 
trary, her courage rose to meet these adverse 
circumstances, and she not only maintained her 
home, keeping her children together, but gave 
to the world an exhibition of what a woman can 
do. If there is one class of women for whom we 
have respect above all other classes,, it is the 
widowed mothers of the land. We have often 
thought that if one undertook to write a history 



272 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

of the great among widow's sons, many vol- 
umes would be required. Take for a single 
illustration of this thought the family of Wen- 
dell Phillips. William Phillips^ grandfather of 
Wendell, died at the early age of thirty-four. 
His young widow so succeeded in the training 
and education of her son as to see him become 
famous as the Hon. John Phillips. Carlos Mar- 
tin says of her : "She was a woman of unusual 
strength of character, well educated and a de- 
voted Christian, and when at last this only son 
stood forth on public occasions as the most fin- 
ished orator of Boston, it was easy to see how 
the mother had molded and made him. John 
Phillips was the father of Wendell, but he, too, 
like his father, was destined for an early death. 
And so when Wendell had seen but twelve years 
his mother was widowed and the entire responsi- 
bility for the education and outfit of a family 
of nine children rested upon her, and Martin 
says : "The sagacious manner in which she met 
and mastered the emergency contributed, no 
doubt, to give her son that respect for, and ap- 
preciation of female ability which became one 
of his characteristic traits/' But, admirable as 
was the result of Sally Phillips' influence over 
Wendell, it was not more to be praised than was 
that which Betsy Holten Moody exerted upon 
her son's life. 



THE PATRON EVANGELIST 273 

When, on one occasion, John Adams said, '^I 
am what my mother made me,'' he voiced the 
same thought expressed by Mr. Moody on the 
occasion of his mother's funeral, when, contrary 
to custom, he stood forth and uttered those 
eloquent words of tribute to her character, and 
of gratitude for her influence upon his own 
life. When someone asked Napoleon what 
France needed, he replied, "Mothers." When 
we trace the history of a great man back to the 
breeding of such a mother as was Mrs. Moody 
we are compelled to say: "America's need is 
the same — 'mothers'!" 

HIS BEGINNINGS IN BUSINESS 

are almost of equal interest with his birth. 
When he was seventeen years of age he left 
Northfield to seek employment in Boston. It 
is not difiicult to imagine the separation of 
mother and son. Those who were at the World's 
Fair and looked on the original, yea, all who 
have studied the copy of the famous picture, 
"Breaking Home Ties," will need no further aid 
to the imagination as they think of the parting 
of Dwight Moody and his mother. Into the 
anxious face of that mother the artist has 
wrought all of the suffering and all of the solici- 
tude incident to the hour when a country wo- 
man gives up her boy to city life — with all of 



274 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

its difficulties of situation, all of its insidious 
temptations, and all of its noble possibilities. 

Dwight encountered difficulties from the first 
day. His uncle, William Holten, was a shoe 
merchant and able to give him a situation. But 
Dwight^s reputation had preceded him to Boston 
and the uncle had been cautioned that if he 
gave the boy a place in the store he must plan 
to take second place himself, for Dwight was 
headstrong and bossy. In consequence, this 
merchant uncle sent the lad forth day after day 
in search of a position, and when he saw that 
even his failures to find one did not discourage 
him, he could not withhold his admiration ; and 
he offered him a place in his own store on two 
conditions: first, that he be obedient; second, 
that he attend the Congregational Church every 
Sunday. The lad readily consented to both, and 
his first place of employment associated him 
with friends destined to help in shaping his life 
and labors. The restraining hand of that uncle 
was an influence needful and beneficent, while 
the love and instruction of the Congregational 
pastor were factors of might in the making of 
the coming man. One of God's best gifts to a 
young man is a true friend. Pastor Stalker 
says: "Such a friend purifies and exalts. He 
may be a second conscience; a consciousness of 
what he expects from us may be a spur to high 



THE PATRON EVANGELIST 275 

endeavor. . . . Even when the fear of fac- 
ing our own conscience might not be strong 
enough to restrain us from evil, the knowledge 
that our conduct will have to encounter his 
judgment, will make the commission of what is 
base intolerable/^ 

How much, therefore, is to be attributed 
to the influence of the merchant uncle, and to 
that of the church pastor, in the making up of 
the sum total of Moody^s manhood no one can 
tell. It is certain, however, that God blessed 
him when He brought him into their asso- 
ciation. 

But, after all, the secret of his success lay 
in the boy himself. He performed his duties 
faithfully. Like Richard Arkwright, the in- 
ventor; like Turner, the painter; like Shakes- 
peare, the poet; like Burns and Ben Johnson, 
Hugh Miller, John Foster, David Livingston 
and others, he compelled poverty to play the 
part of the stepping stone, adversity to mother 
ambition, disappointment to give place to hope 
by doing his every duty well; and, as the old 
maxim says: "Heaven helps those who help 
themselves.'^ 

In 1856, the nineteen-year-old lad was leav- 
ing Boston for Chicago, quitting his uncle's 
shoe store to take a better position in the same 
business in the western city. 



276 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

It was here in Chicago that he 

BLOSSOMED INTO AN EVANGELIST. 

The beginnings of his religious work, like 
his boyhood, and his embarkation in business, 
were small and seemingly insignificant. In Chi- 
cago he united with the Plymouth Congrega- 
tional Church. As many know, it was even then 
one of the well-to-do and aristocratic institu- 
tions of the city. Imagine, then, the surprise of 
the splendid superintendent when this awkward 
and uncouth lad made application to teach a 
class. He was told there was no vacancy — 
model school ! Some men would have gone off 
with injured feelings to speak angry words, but 
this youth, burning with enthusiasm, did the 
saner thing. He hied himself to some of the 
back streets, and there made friends with a 
score of ragamuffins, and on the following Sab- 
bath had them seated on a log half covered by 
the sands that make up Lake Michigan shore, 
and for a Sabbath or two he opened up to this 
company the Word of God. Again he went back 
to the superintendent in the Plymouth Church 
and asked for a class, and that Christian gentle- 
man replied: ^'You can teach if you get your 
own class. ^' It was just the word that Moody 
wanted, and the very next Sunday, to the con- 
sternation of some of those who were willing to 



THE PATRON EVANGELIST 277 

send their money to evangelize the heathen, and 
who had shed many tears over the degraded 
estate of people in India, China, Japan and 
Africa, but who had never concerned themselves 
for the State street crowd, he led them in, four- 
teen strong, and seated them well to the front. 
Through the influence of a well-to-do and godly 
young man. Moody and his unwashed were per- 
mitted to become permanent factors in the 
Plymouth Church. Today in Mr. Moody's 
home in Northfield you will meet an inter- 
esting sight. In strange contrast with the 
splendid oil paintings which adorn the walls of 
the Moody home there hang two modest little 
photographs framed in plain oak. One of them 
represents the fourteen boys as they were when 
Moody began with them. They are unkempt, 
ragged, dirty, unattractive! The other repre- 
sents the twelve boys upon whom Mr. Moody 
was able to keep his hold. And though the time 
between the first picture and the second was not 
long, the transformation is marked and beauti- 
ful, for these twelve are clean-faced, the hair 
of each has been tamed and trained by the 
comb, while their clothes have no hint of dirt or 
rags. Under the first of these pictures is written 
the words, ^^Does it pay?'' Under the second is 
written, ^^It does pay.'^ There in that work was 
the promise of God's prophet. The elements 



278 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

that made him great never better manifested 
themselves than they did in that matter. There 
he showed his enthusiasm for souls. There he 
showed himself difficult to discourage. There 
he showed himself capable of reaching the ne- 
glected. There he manifested that matchless 
love for his fellow men which was the never 
failing secret of his success in dealing with 
them. From that time he followed the prompt- 
ings of the Spirit and the young shoe merchant 
as naturally became the Y. M. C. A. secretary, 
and eventually the great evangelist, as did 
Philip, the deacon, become Philip the peerless 
preacher, under the guidance of the same Spirit. 
One thing has profoundly impressed us as 
we have studied Moody, the young man. He 
seems never to have dreamed of his own abilities ; 
and while John B. Farwell and John Wana- 
maker were among his early friends and had 
great faith in him, it is doubtful if they ever 
divined his splendid powers until the years had 
proved them. It has been true of most 
great men that they have appreciated their own 
abilities. When Henry Ward Beecher was but 
a lad in Indianapolis he set such price upon his 
own sermons as to presume upon their publica- 
tion at a time when printing was expensive and 
patronage difficult. When Dr. Lorimer was yet 
in his youth he published his "Jesus — the 



THE PATRON EVANGELIST 270 

World's Saviour/* a book concerning which, fif- 
teen years ago, he said : "I esteem it my 
best/' When Charles Spurgeon was a lad the 
great Dr. Knill took him upon his knee one day 
and said: "This boy will yet preach the Gos- 
pel, and he will preach it to a great multitude. 
I am persuaded that he will preach in the chapel 
of Eowland Hill." But Moody seems never to 
have entertained such a thought of himself, and 
if the most ardent admirers of his youth saw 
evidence of his coming greatness they were 
silent about it. But, as Dr. Gunsaulus, lectur- 
ing on the great Savonarola, said, as he pictured 
that great prophet of God going on from con- 
quest to conquest, from triumph to triumph, 
"One never rises so high as when one does not 
know whither one is going.** But if we were to 
ask how it came to pass that this country bred 
boy, this ungainly and uneducated young sales- 
man, shoots into the zenith of religious life and 
shines there for forty years with a luster which 
dims the brilliance of the brainiest men of 
English and American ministry; how it comes 
to pass that this slouchy looking Sunday School 
teacher, beginning with fourteen slum urchins, 
is suddenly standing on the platform, swept 
about by the thousands of the high and low, the 
rich and the poor, the ignorant and the learned, 
swaying with his fervent speech the whole mul- 



280 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

titude, we are compelled to answer, "It was only 
because he surrendered himself absolutely to do 
the Divine will/' 

In studying Moody in the ascendant one is 
impressed that he was 

BROADENED BY HIS BLESSINGS. 

Success with him resulted in greater unsel- 
fishness. One of the secrets of his success in 
dealing with the ministers of this country has 
been his unselfishness. He was extremely careful 
to have as many ministers as possible take part 
in his services, and often asked if there were 
some of the pastors who had not been invited 
to the platform. Every singer, from the time 
of Mr. Sankey's service, down to his latest as- 
sociate, found him not a master, but a brother. 
But that unselfishness displayed itself more per- 
fectly still in his methods of handling money. 
He was a master at taking collections. Thou- 
sands and hundreds of thousands of dollars the 
public has put into his hands, and while he 
might have kept a considerable portion as a 
rightful exchange for his preaching, he retained 
of it all only a comfortable living, and would 
have left his wife and children in poverty but 
for the importunity of friends who succeeded, 
just a little while before his decease, in arguing 
him into a life insurance. One of the tests of 



THE PATRON EVANGELIST 281 

manhood is what one does with his money, and 
the touchstone of one's Christianity is his 
treatment of silver and gold. 

Another respect in which Mr. Moody was 
broadened by his blessings appeared in the fact 
that swelling audiences drove him to study. 
There are not a few men in Am.erica and En- 
gland, whose only honor is a college degree, 
and who at one time spoke sneeringly of Moody^s 
lack of education. At the time of his death Dr. 
Henry C. Mabie referred to this sneer and pitied 
the man that uttered it, saying : "Mr. Moody's 
private library is one of the best I have ever 
looked upon, and few men of my acquaintance 
are such students of books as this peerless evan- 
gelist.'^ That he was more than a patron of 
learning, that he was her faithful friend, is evi- 
denced by those magnificent schools which stand 
at Northfield — a monument to his labors, and 
his gift to the Master, and to needy men. No 
wonder February 5th is made a holiday in that 
little town; no wonder the stores are closed on 
that day each year and all business is suspended, 
and the people turn into the house of God. 
That thousand acres of land beautified beyond 
any possibilities of art; those thirty buildings 
erected in the cause of education; those three 
schools, the Female Seminary, Mount Hermon 
for the boys, and the Training School for both 



282 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

sexes, that summer assembly — a fountain 
opened for the revival of men's souls — through 
the instruction of the Word ! Are not these in- 
deed institutions in which any village in the 
land would rejoice? And if this little town — 
more nearly a miniature heaven today than any- 
thing we have known on earth beside — did not 
commemorate his birth and mourn over his 
death it would be a village of ingrates indeed. 
Time will not suffice for us to speak of his 
loyalty to the Word of God. The noblest de- 
fender of a full inspiration, the kindest but 
keenest critic of the critics, he stood always firm 
for the old faith. If Paul had lived in his 
time, and had occasion to write to Moody, he 
would never have said, as he did to Timothy: 
"I charge thee therefore before God, and the 
Lord Jesus Christ, who shall judge the quick 
and the dead at His appearing and His kingdom, 
preach the Word; be instant in season, out of 
season; reprove, rebuke, exhort with all long- 
suffering and doctrine. For the time will come 
when they will not endure sound doctrine; but 
after their own lusts shall heap to themselves 
teachers, having itching ears; And they shall 
turn away their ears from the truth and shall 
be turned into fables. But watch thou in all 
things, endure afflictions, do the work of an 
evangelist, make full proof of thy ministry.'' 



THE PATRON EVANGELIST 283 

(2 Tim. 4:1-4.) There would have been no 
need, for Paul was not more faithful to that 
Word than was this modern prophet, nor did 
he know better how to preach it. 

THE MONUMENTS TO HIS MEMORY ARE NOT 
ALONE AT NORTHFIELD. 

The Moody Church in Chicago is easily the 
greatest agency for evangelism known to that 
city, or to the entire West. In addition to the 
hundreds of souls that are saved through its 
direct work, the students of its Training School 
are going out annually in splendid companies — 
agents of God and His Gospel every one; while 
the Colportage Association press is pouring out 
a stream of publications that make up indeed a 
Eiver of Life on either bank of which trees of 
knowledge grow, whose leaves are for the heal- 
ing of the nations. 

But, in our judgment, the greatest work Mr. 
Moody ever did is the one of which men make 
the least mention, namely, the one of evangeliz- 
ing those pastors who are not utterly indifferent 
to their true ministry, and those churches which 
were not too cold to respond to the call of this 
modern prophet of God. The Clarendon Street 
Church dated the day of its enlargement and 
power to the meetings held there thirty-five 
years ago by Mr. Moody. Among his later 



284 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

labors was a meeting in Tremont Temple, Bos- 
ton. A friend, writing of the services of that 
great church on the Sunday succeeding his 
death, said: "When Dr. Lorimer had finished 
his morning sermon concerning Mr. Moody a 
score of people rose to request the saved to pray 
for them. At night, after a fervent, affection- 
ate plea by Dr. Lorimer, a watch-meeting was 
entered upon, in the course of which a full 
hundred more rose to say: 'Brethren, pray 
that we may be saved.^ " Oh, that this great 
Evangelist might have lived to breathe upon 
every pastor of the land, and upon every church 
a reviving breath; and to have witnessed them 
enjoying, everyone, a Perennial Eevival. 



THE PEEENNIAL EEYIYAL AND THE 
EEFOEMATION OF SOCIETY. 



CHAPTEE XIV. 

THE PEEEj^NIAL EEVIVAL AND THE 
EEFOEMATION OF SOCIETY. 

At the close of an address on "Jesus, the So- 
cial Eeformer," treated entirely from a Scrip- 
tural standpoint, a well-instructed auditor said : 
"I confess to great surprise in finding how much 
Jesus did as a social reformer, and how often He 
spoke on the subject of property and poverty. 
'No man can go through the New Testament 
Gospels and note the words of Jesus on these 
themes without surprise. He was indeed the 
Social Eeformer of all ages. His mission was 
the most revolutionary one the world ever saw. 
One thing that churchmen need to learn is this : 
that the mission of the Son of Man is their mis- 
sion, if their profession of faith is at all genu- 
ine. What He ''hegan to do and teach" we 
must continue until "the day-star arises and the 
shadows flee away.'' Every opinion which He 
expressed upon this very important topic of the 
social order should be ardently repeated and 
propagated by His disciples. As He spake the 
truth in love so should we voice it for all man- 
kind. There is a love that criticises only, 
and there is a love that corrects and de- 

287 



288 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

velops. The latter needs to be more fer- 
vent than the former, else men will call it into 
question. Every social reformer should defi- 
nitely understand that apart from love he can 
do nothing. To create a race prejudice, to in- 
cite class spirit, to irritate still further existing 
contentions — these are all easy. But to stand 
before armies drawn up for battle, and so plead 
the cause of peace as to scabbard the sword — 
that is more honorable. Such is the office of 
the church in its work of social reform. 

It is the purpose of this chapter to make 
some suggestions as to how the church might 
execute its social mission. These suggestions 
will reveal the relations between the perennial 
revival and social reform. 

SAVE THE INDIVIDUAL FROM SIN". 

The mission of the Son of Man is clearly ex- 
pressed in Luke 19 :10 : "The Son of Man is 
come to seek and to save that which was lost.^' 
If, therefore, the mission of the Son of Man and 
the mission of the church is one, the first work 
of the latter is to win men from the world's 
sins. 

Sin is the tap-root of all social disorder. It 
matters not what form that disorder takes, sin 
is always its origin. The indolent man is guilty 
of the sin of sloth. The imbecile is such only 



THE REFORMATION OF SOCIETY 289 

because sin has marred what God made perfect. 
When the strong oppress the weak they are 
guilty of an awful iniquity. When the great or 
small indulge the passions of the flesh, the 
fruits thereof are apples of Sodom to the social 
order. Mr. Dugdale, in a work on "Criminol- 
ogy" tells us that to one bad woman, in In- 
dianapolis, was born five daughters, known in 
police circles as '''the Juke sisters.^^ At the time 
Mr. Dugdale wrote his book the descendants 
of those five women numbered twelve hundred 
and sixty-one. Of all the males in this family 
only twenty had any profession at all, and ten 
of those learned their trade behind prison bars. 
Of all the women in this company, fifty-two per 
cent were fallen ; while only two per cent of the 
entire progeny seemed to be normal in mind 
and morals. Up to the time of Dugdale's writ- 
ing that family had cost the state of Indiana a 
million and a quarter dollars. Who will say 
that the first work of the church is not to save 
the individual from sin ? Who can compute the 
contribution that would have been made to the 
social order had this sinful mother been won 
from her wickedness to the true worship of the 
Son of God, before one of those five daughters 
ever opened her eyes to the light of day ? 

The saved man contributes to social right- 
eousness. His life stands for a better social or- 



290 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

der. What reforming force is so positive and 
powerful as a person? How much poorer the 
social order would be had Paul never lived, had 
Luther perished in swaddling clothes, had Bun- 
yan continued in hisi wicked ways, had Wilber- 
force never been visited by the Spirit of God, 
had Wendell Phillips never heard Lyman 
Beecher's sermon on the subject "You Belong 
to God!^* It will be a victorious time for the 
church if she ever sets herself to the problem of 
making men, as Josiah Strong suggests, '^y 
trying to remove every moral and physical evil ; 
to give every child who comes into the world the 
best possible chance; to lend a hand to every 
man struggling to be free from sin and ignor- 
ance, and to attain to righteousness and knowl- 
edge." God told Abraham that ten righteous 
men could save Sodom. Henry Drummond, in 
his picture of "A city without a church," thinks 
that ten righteous men would save the world's 
greatest and wickedest municipal center. The 
life of Savonarola in Florence, Italy, would 
seem to illustrate the claim. It was the time 
when the Medici sat on the throne ; when, as S. 
E. Herrick puts it, "Culture was wedded to 
corruption." "It was an age whose external 
garb was elegant, whose inmost heart was moral 
rottenness; an age whose only grand enthu- 
Biasms were for art and vice." Yet, this solitary 



THE REFORMATION OF SOCIETY 291 

man went into a city where "splendor and 
cruelty walked hand in hand; where, in the 
ducal palace perpetual feastings were going on 
in gorgeous saloons; where the clinking of 
glass and crystals was matched by the clanking 
of fetters in the dungeons underneath/' He un- 
covered that cruelty to the eyes of its perpetra- 
tors; he exposed those feastings before the face 
of God; he stopped the clinking of glass and 
the riot of drink ; he struck the fetters from the 
ankles of slaves. When he finished with the 
throne, the ruler had been led to repentance, 
compelled to restore his ill-gotten gain, and to 
give Florence her freedom. Such a life as this, 
with its effect upon the social order, makes one 
feel the truth of that now popular phrase, "What 
we need is not more men ; but more man !" 

CONSTEUCT A NEW SOCIETY. 

Jesus came to do this. No man can read the 
ministry of the Son of God reported in the 
four Gospels and question it. And here again 
the mission of Christ ought to be the mission of 
the church. 

It should form a circle within a circle. 
The way to correct society is not to begin at 
the rim, and try to set it all right, from cir- 
cumference to center, by a single enactment. 
One must work from within outward. "When 



292 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

in the later fifties, good democrats saw that 
their party was linked indissolubly with the 
custom of slavery, they began an abolition agi- 
tation. One man won another, and the two a 
third, and so on until the heart of democracy 
was eaten out, and a social revolution was the 
result. That Jesus meant to build up a soci- 
ety within society is evident in His speech 
concerning His own disciples; ^'I pray not for 
the world ; but for them which thou hast given 
me, for they are thine. I have given them 
thy word, and the world hath hated them, be- 
cause they are not of the world even as I am 
not of the world." ^^I pray not that thou 
shouldst take them out of the world, but that 
thou shouldst keep them from the evil ; they are 
not of the world, even as I am not of the 
world." (John 17 :9, 14-16.) 

Did you ever think how significant the ex- 
pression which the Jews at Thessalonica em- 
ployed concerning Paul and Silas — disciples 
of this same Jesus? They went to the house 
of one Jason, supposed to be entertaining these 
brethren, and violently assaulted it, carrying 
Jason and certain brethren unto the rulers of 
the city, and crying, "These that have turned 
the world upside down have come hither also. 
And these all do contrary to the decrees of 
Caesar." The charge was well founded. This 



THE REFORMATION OF SOCIETY 293 

little circle of Christ's disciples having found 
the world wrong-side np had set themselves to 
the task of righting it. They, having seen the 
superiority of Christ over Caesar, propagated 
the opinions of the former as against the de- 
crees of the latter. The world today is in equal 
need of being righted, and the politics of this 
hour smell as loudly of corruption, and are put 
to the same inconvenience by the opinions of 
the Christ. It is a circle within a circle, a 
company working from the center to the cir- 
cumference; a society instituted of God to set 
things to rights. 

It must condenmj, hy contrast, dad social 
customs. The men who bring in a new 
social order will not be selfish reformers. 
Holtzman, a German theologian, says, "There 
can be no manner of doubt that the funda- 
mental ideas of socialism ought to be referred 
to Jesus.^^ Professor Peabody justly re- 
marks: "There is a subtle difference, as of a 
change of atmosphere, when one passes from 
the presence of many social reformers and ap- 
proaches the spirit of the teaching of Jesus. 
One breathes in the Gospels a climate of tol- 
erance, mercy and many-sidedness, which is 
far from stimulating to the socialist's temper, 
and moderates the bitterness of his indictment 
of the world. That accounts for the fact that 



294 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

Carl Marx parts company with the Christ, and 
puts his plea into the phrases of the materialist. 
Yet what scheme of social reform ever proved 
itself so effective as has the very conduct of 
consistent Christians? When Paul carried the 
Gospel to Rome law was the watch-word of the 
state, tyranny the custom of its emperors, 
oppression the practice of its favored classes. 
In a single century the whole face of society 
was changed. Love vied with law; the em- 
peror thought more humbly of himself; the 
upper classes recognized in their slaves Chris- 
tian brethren and sisters. This same society, 
called Christian, compasses a similar mission 
to this moment. 

You can follow the track of the true Church 
of God by the better social order left in its 
train. Witness England and America where 
Protestant Christianity are in the ascendency; 
go into the heathen worlds, and wherever you 
find a church you find the beginnings of civ- 
ilization, the rising consciousness of a common 
brotherhood, and the exercise of an increasing 
justice as between man and man. When in 
1872 Mr. Moody was returning from Europe 
there were a number of ministers on board. 
A young man with the spirit of a braggart 
stepped up to the captain and said in a loud 
tone that he was sorry he had taken passage on 



THE REFORMATION OF SOCIETY 295 

that boat, as it would be unlucky to travel with 
so many parsons. The captain was himself a 
pretty rough fellow, but he had no sympathy 
with this egotist, and replied: "You fool; if 
you will show me a town in England where 
there are five thousand people and not one par- 
son, I will show you a place a mile nearer hell 
than you have ever been/^ The average Eu- 
ropean or American hardly imagines how 
much of the good social order which he enjoys 
is due to the Gospel- of the Son of God. 

Dr. Fred Haggard states that he has seen a 
filthy, almost nude, ignorant Assamese woman, 
with the juice of the beetle nut running from 
each corner of her mouth, transformed in five 
short years into a woman of genuine refine- 
ment, with habits of tidiness, clothed as a 
Westerner, worthy to be spoken of as civi- 
lized. What did it? The village in which 
she lived underwent a kindred change in 
the same brief season. What did it? Dr. 
Clark, missionary in the Congo Free State 
Africa, testifies to having seen the same social 
order brought from heathen confusion in as 
short a season. What did it? Informed men 
will tell you that it came about in consequence 
of the regenerating influences of the Gospel of 
the Son of God. 

Some time since, in a Sunday School Con- 



296 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

vention in Minneapolis, Marion Lawrence re- 
ported how William Keynolds drove into a 
county seat in Southern Illinois and found it 
an utterly God-forsaken place, a veritable 
Sodom indeed. Saloons competed with dwell- 
ing houses for numbers; the county jail was 
full of criminals, and an iron railing, run- 
ning around the building, had two score of 
men, with manacled hands, chained to it, be- 
cause the prison appointments could not receive 
all who belonged behind the bars. In seven 
years the saloons had gone, the chains had 
been taken from the wrists of this evil row; 
and even the jail's cells contained but a single 
man. What wrought the change? A circle 
within a circle ; a church within the city ; Chris- 
tian conduct contrasting bad social customs. 
Do you tell us that an institution capable of 
this victory can do nothing for the solution 
of the great social problems which now appeal 
to beneficent powers for a solution? 

PREACH AND PRACTICE SOCIAL RIGHTEOUSNESS. 

The truth will tell on the social order. Who 
can better teach it than a Church of Christ? 
For centuries it has been the custodian of 
God's truth as revealed in His Word — the best 
book ever written on social order. Wise social- 
ists and intelligent Christians are, alike, work- 



THE REFORMATION OF SOCIETY 297 

ing for the recovery of the scheme of social life 
set forth in that Book. As long ago as the 
time of Moses God provided against the ac- 
cumulation of great estates to pass them on to 
indolent heirs. As long ago as Moses' time, 
God, through the same Word, uttered an 
Emancipation Proclamation, which was ef- 
fective every seven years. As long ago as 
Moses' time God declared the right of the 
laborer to share with the owner the fruits of 
the field; and as long ago as Jesus' time God 
presented the peril of riches, witnessed in the 
strongest words against all oppression, and 
affirmed in unmistakable speech, the fraternity 
of all men. What wonder, then, that Carol 
D. Wright, qualified by the office which he 
holds to understand the social problem at first 
hand, and fitted by his knowledge of the Word 
of God to know what it says concerning this 
great subject, wrote, sometime since, these 
words: "After many years of investigation 
into the social, moral, and industrial condition 
of the people, I came to the conclusion that in 
the adoption of the philosophy of the religion 
of Christ as a practical creed for the conduct 
of business there was to be found the surest 
and speediest solution of the difficulties which 
excite the minds of men, and which lead many 
to think social, industrial, and political revo- 



298 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

lution is at hand. I still remain of the same 
opinion/^ Dr. George C. Lorimer, speaking of 
the effort which men have made to frame a 
social Gospel with Christ left out, says: ^'De- 
prived of the supernatural, how much of sanc- 
tity and authority would survive? Eobbed of 
that distinction, religion could pretend to no 
revelations and could impart no assurance. 
Eepudiating it, men and women have tried to 
worship and do good to their fellows ; but they 
have found no basis on which to rest duty or 
to make it anything other than mere prefer- 
ence, and they have been unable to comfort the 
afflicted with anything but a vague fancy rela- 
tive to a future life. They have eulogized the 
gospel of soup and bread, clothes and shelter, 
have so idealized humanity as to substitute it 
for God himself, and have awakened a tem- 
porary interest in their experiments; but the 
outcome has uniformly discouraged them. They 
have found that charity apart from spiritual 
communion with the Almighty increases its 
objects ; that the soup of today will not satisfy 
the poor of tomorrow; that pauperism actually 
grows under the touch of relief that is prompted 
simply by secularism ; and that the crowd soon 
turns up its nose at the worship of humanity. 
The Christianity that succeeds in bringing suc- 
cor to the forlorn and destitute is unquestion- 



THE REFORMATION OF SOCIETY 299 

ably the Christianity that is grounded in the 
supernatural, and whose very doctrines are 
permeated through and through with the super- 
natural." To teach that doctrine, then, is the 
plain duty of the church. It is no mere sophis- 
try to say, "Truth is mighty and will prevail." 
There was a time when slavery was the custom 
of the world, but Christ^s single sentence, "All 
ye are brethren," brought it to an end. There 
was a time when polygamy was a common 
practice, but God's Word concerning the better 
custom of monogamy has condemned it as sin 
and made it a shame. There was a time when 
rulers oppressed the people with impunity, but 
wherever Christ's name is known and His 
Gospel spoken, that custom comes more and 
more to an end. He is a poor philosopher who 
does not know that Truth is an effective social 
reformer. The time is past when the average 
family is compelled to live on an income of 
$30.00 per annum; when the .common people 
are permitted to own no land; when the poor 
perish without a physician; and the ignorant 
can enjoy no opportunities of education. And 
what brought it to an end? Among other 
things, certainly the utterance of that truth 
which has fearlessly denounced tyranny on 
the one side, and called to account lawlessness 
on the other. 



300 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

If there is one thing, however, which is 
more potent than teaching the truth, it is to 
live it. Hence our statement, 'Hdj the preach- 
ing and practice of social righteousness." Pro- 
fessor Peabody says, "Many a man can teach 
Christian doctrine to heathen listeners; but 
only a life, which has been ^id with Christ 
in God^ can communicate to heathen lives the 
spiritual energy which proceeds through Christ 
from God." We all understand his meaning. 
The "Son of Man came not to be ministered 
unto, but to minister." "The disciple is not 
above his Master." "As the Father sent Christ 
even so sends He us." We are not in the world 
to fleece it, but here to favor and help it. A 
clean distinction has been made by Josiah 
Strong on this point when he says, "Commer- 
cial service aims to supply a demand; Chris- 
tian service aims to meet a need." There is a 
vast deal of preaching in the world that would 
be more effective if turned into practice; as 
there is a vast deal of praying that would be 
more consistent if associated with doing. To 
illustrate, we noticed a few days ago a little 
squib from the Omaha World-Herald to the 
effect that a poor man was sick and in severe 
financial straits. Some of his brethren of the 
church met at his house to pray for his speedy 
recovery and asked God to send material sus- 



THE REFORMATION OF SOCIETY 301 

tenance to his family. While one of the dea- 
cons was offering a fervent petition there was 
a rap at the door. A friend opening it found 
this same farmer's stout son standing on the 
steps. "How do you do^ my boy ; what brought 
you here?'' "I have brought Pa's prayers/' 
he replied. "Brought your Pa's prayers; what 
do you mean?" "Yep, I have brought his 
prayers and they are out in the wagon. You 
jest help me and we will get them in." In- 
vestigation disclosed the fact that he had 
hauled from his father's house a load of pota- 
toes, apples, corn-meal, flour, bacon, together 
with some clothing, and a lot of jellies for the 
sick. And the reporter went on to say that 
this discovery ^^Droke the meeting up." And 
yet, underneath this facetious story, there is 
a most serious suggestion. To preach the truth 
is a power, as praying is; but to practice it is 
the better part. The words of Jesus are again 
in requisition: "Then shall He say also unto 
them on the left hand. Depart from me, ye 
cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the 
devil and his angels : For I was an hungered, 
and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and 
ye gave me no drink: I was a stranger, and 
ye took me not in; naked, and ye clothed me 
not; sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not. 
Then shall they also answer Him, saying. Lord, 



302 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

when saw we thee an hungered, or athirst, or 
a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and 
did not minister unto thee? Then shall he 
answer them saying, Verily I say unto you, 
inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of 
these, ye did it not to me.'' 

God works with them who walk with Him. 
How any man can hope to influence the social 
order for righteousness without first finding 
out what God thinks about it, without praying 
for His guidance at every step, we can not 
understand. The selfish are always trying to 
get God to agree with them. The wise are 
always searching for God's thought that they 
may be in agreement with Him. It is said that 
during the stormy days of the civil war some- 
one asked Abraham Lincoln to appoint a day 
of fasting and prayer that God might be on the 
side of the Union army. ^^Don't bother about 
that," said the man of common sense, "God is 
now on the right side, and simply get with 
Him." When the church gets with Him a 
Perennial Eevival will follow, and in that re- 
vival social reform will be surely found. 



THE PEEENNIAL EEVIVAL AND 
WOELD EVANGELIZATION. 



CHAPTEE XY. 

THE PEEENNIAL EEVIYAL AND 
WOELD EVANGELIZATION. 

Some time ago a well-to-do Baptist contrib- 
uted five hundred dollars to the Baptist Mis- 
sionary Union, requesting that it be expended 
in distributing to the Baptist pastors of the 
North John E. Mott's book, "The Evangeliza- 
tion of the World in this Generation." The 
volumes sent out were attended with the re- 
quest that the pastors read the work and give 
to their people the benefit thereof. This wise 
Christian man knew the relation of work 
abroad to a revival at home. He appreciated 
what Jacob Eiis later expressed in the follow- 
ing language: "Every once in a while I hear 
some one growl against Foreign Missions be- 
cause the money and the strength put into them 
are needed at home. I did myself when I did 
not know better; God forgive me! I know 
better now; and I will tell you how I found 
out. I became interested in a strong religious 
awakening in my old city of Copenhagen, and 
I set about investigating it. It was then that 
I learned what others had learned before me, 

and what was the fact there — ^that for every 

305 



306 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

dollar you give away to convert the heathen 
abroad, God gives you ten dollars' worth of 
purpose to deal with your heathen at home/^ 
Hence the gift of this volume of Mott's. We 
commend its reading, and for the present con- 
tent ourselves with culling out some general 
facts and figures for use in this chapter. 

Ever since the Student Volunteer Movement 
adopted this statement, "The Evangelization of 
the World in this Generation/' as its watch- 
Vord, we have been mightily impressed with 
the wisdom and inspiration of their motto. It 
is always wise to set for the church of Jesus 
Christ a worthy goal; and there is a wonderful 
inspiration in a mere appeal to high, yet possi- 
ble attainment. There could be no stronger 
argument in favor of the wisdom of this watch- 
word than that found in the fact that while 
the optimism of youth first voiced this battle- 
cry, "The Evangelization of the World in this 
Generation" — in the Ecumenical Missionary 
Conference, held in New York City, the oldest 
missionaries in attendance, men who had been 
for forty years face to face with heathenism, 
expressed their convictions that the proposition 
involved was not only worthy of an endeavor, 
but easily within the power of the church as 
at present constituted. Admitting the possi- 
bility, the responsibility for evangelizing the 



THE WORLD EVANGELIZATION 307 

world in this generation is at once upon us. 
You will remember how, when John Williams, 
the apostle to the South Sea Islands, once pro- 
posed to return to his native country and urge 
his fellow Christians to furnish more mission- 
aries for the South Seas, a chieftain replied: 
"Go with all speed, get all the missionaries 
you can, and come back as soon as you can, but 
many of us will be dead before you return." 
Arthur T. Pierson says, "The whole pathos of 
missions was in that short entreaty." And it 
can not be denied that the whole proposition of 
evangelizing the world in this generation was 
suggested by the same appeal. The heathen 
now living must have the truth at the lips of 
the Christians now living, or never hear it at 
all, for by the time the sands of life have run 
out with us, their hundreds of millions will be 
sleeping beneath the sod. It is high time, 
then, that the church cease from the thought 
of committing the heathen to the next genera- 
tion, and begin the march involved in Christ's 
Great Commission. For that march there is 
inspiration in the saying of Jesus, as found in 
His solemn address in Matthew 24: "For 
this Gospel of the kingdom shall be preached 
in all the world for a witness unto all na- 
tions and then shall the end come." 



308 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 



«r 



*THIS GOSPEL OF THE KINGDOM/' 

"This Gospel'' is God's specific for si/a. 
When Paul was writing his epistle to the Eo- 
mans he said : "I am not ashamed of the Gros- 
pel of Christ; for it is the power of God imto 
salvation to every one that believeth." And, 
again, '^Whosoever shall call upon the name of 
the Lord shall be saved. How, then, shall they 
call on him in whom they have not believed, and 
how shall they believe in Him of whom they 
have not heard ; and how shall they hear without 
a preacher; and how shall they preach except 
they be sent; as it is written. How beautiful 
are the feet of them that preach the Gospel 
of Peace. ... So then faith cometh by 
hearing, and hearing by the Word of God.'' 
Mark's report of the Great Commission is: 
"Preach the Gospel to every creature. He that 
believeth and is baptized shall be saved, but he 
that believeth not shall be damned." There 
can be little question that one of the reasons, 
perhaps the most important one, for the slow 
progress of the church in recent years, and the 
present penury of our missionary treasuries, 
comes in consequence of calling this Scripture 
into question. Too many doctors of divinity, 
and professors of universities, have taken to pre- 
scribing other specifics for sin. Education is a 
good prescription for ignorance, and social set- 



THE WORLD EVANGELIZATION 309 

tlements for filth and squalor, and institutional 
churches for the submerged ; but for the sinful 
— ^high or low, rich or poor, educated or ignor- 
ant — the Gospel of the Son of God is the only 
saving potion. Those who are stained must be 
brought to the foot of the cross where flows His 
cleansing blood; and those who are anguished 
in spirit and overburdened can be freed only by 
learning of "Him who bore our sins in His own 
body on the Tree/^ We believe with Henry Van 
Dyke, '^Christianity has ceased to be the religion 
of the unshepherded multitude when it has 
ceased to proclaim redemption through Christ^s 
blood/' We also believe that in all the multi- 
tude of anguished, weary, living, dying souls, 
there is not a man or a woman so low that the 
cross can not lift him, or so loathsome that the 
blood can not make him clean. 

One day as John Williams was walking along 
in one of the South Sea Islands he passed a 
row of six or eight stone seats, where the natives 
sat to chat with the passersby, and a cripple 
crawled from one of these seats crying to Wil- 
liams : 'Welcome, servant of God, who brought 
light into this dark island. To you we are in- 
debted for the word of heaven.^' Williams was 
greatly surprised, for he had never seen the man 
before, and on finding him well instructed in 
the Bible, he asked : "Where did you get all this 



aiO THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

knowledge?'* The beggar answered: "As the 
people return from the service I sit at the way- 
side and beg from them, as they pass by, a bit 
of the Word. One gives me one piece, and 
another another, and I gather them together in 
my heart, and thinking over what I thus ob- 
tain, and praying to God to make me know, I 
get to understand/^ If the Gospel could reach 
the heart of that heathen, and bring to him 
hope, where is the man whose sins are such this 
same truth can not save him ? 

"The Kingdoni' is the heynote of this Gos^ 
pel. 

Perhaps no man has ever given himself to a 
study of the Gospel, as expressed by the four 
reporters, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, 
without being impressed by the continual re- 
currence of the phrase "The kingdom of God'' 
or "The kingdom of Heaven." As John Wat- 
son has said: "Jesus is ever preaching the 
'Kingdom of God' and explaining it in parables 
and images of exquisite simplicity. He exhorts 
them to make any sacrifice that they may enter 
the Kingdom of God. He warns certain that 
they must not look back, lest they should not be 
fit for the kingdom of God. He declares that 
it is not possible for others to enter the king- 
dom of God. He encourages one because 'he is 
not far from the kingdom of God.' He gives 



THE WORLD EVANGELIZATION 311 

to his chief apostle the keys of the kingdom of 
Heaven. He rates the Pharisees because they 
shut up Hhe kingdom of Heaven' against men. 
He comforts the poor because theirs is *the king- 
dom of Heaven/ and he invites the nations to 
sit down with Abraham in *the kingdom of 
Heaven/ The kingdom was in His thought, 
the chiefest good of the soul, and the hope of 
the world, *^the one far-off divine event to which 
the whole creation moves'." 

It is not surprising, therefore, that those 
men who have seen, in all missionary endeavor 
at home and abroad, a work that looked directly 
to, and prepared absolutely for, the coming of 
the kingdom, should have been the great mis- 
sionary spirits of the ages. As those who have 
believed in the full and perfect inspiration of 
God's Word have been the evangelists of times 
past, so those who have looked for the Kingdom 
of God to be set up in this world and Christ 
Himself to reign, have been the missionary 
enthusiasts of the centuries. When we repeat 
the Lord's Prayer our lips voice the cry of the 
centuries, "Thy kingdom come." Why do we so 
pray ? Is it not because we know that the king- 
dom is not come as yet; and also because we 
know it is going to come ; and that the preach- 
ing of "this Gospel" must usher it in? But 
when we pray that prayer do we think it possible 



312 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

that this generation might see the complete 
answer, that those of us who are now living 
might yet witness what the prophets of the past 
have longed to see? Again, when we pray 
that prayer do we realize that whether we live to 
see its answer or no, will depend solely upon 
how we conduct ourselves with reference to this 
great problem of world evangelization? 

In order to deepen that thought we turn at- 
tention to the completed sentence which con- 
tains 

THE saviour's SWEEPING PROMISE. 

"This Gospel of the kingdom shall be 
preached in all the world for a witness to all 
nations." 

The promise insures the proclamation of 
truth. 

"This Gospel of the kingdom shall be 
preached.'^ When those words were uttered they 
were the most preposterous that ever passed the 
lips of man. They must have sounded strangely 
to even the ears of Christ's followers and friends. 
The world, even as they knew it, was large. The 
speaker, Christ Himself, was a humble man, 
with no money to make even a beginning of 
such missionary endeavor; with no position of 
power from which to proclaim his will in the 
matter; while His followers were few and 
feeble. And yet the possibility of having this 



THE WORLD EVANGELIZATION 313 

proclamation perfected was apparent at the end 
of the first century, when the Eoman world 
had not only heard this truth but, in great 
part, received it. And while the world of to- 
day is so much larger, there never was a time 
when this promise seemed so near to realization 
as now. Less than twenty years ago, in New 
York City, A. B. Simpson, a plain man, and 
a faithful preacher, gave up his Presbyterian 
pastorate and inaugurated what has come to be 
known as the Christian and Missionary Alli- 
ance; and today the messengers of that Alli- 
ance are beneath every sun, being heard by 
almost every people, and out of the deepest 
poverty, the brethren and sisters of that move- 
ment are contributing a half a million a year to 
missions. 

The Moravian movement is perhaps even a 
better illustration of how a feeble folk can 
be made a multitude for God; and, from an 
apparently insignificant center, send their mis- 
sionaries to the ends of the earth. When Mott's 
book was published this little company of be- 
lievers had three hundred and seventy-nine mis- 
sionaries on foreign fields; while their mem- 
bership at home was less than twenty-five thou- 
sand communicants, or about one for every forty 
Northern Baptists. Such has been their con- 
tribution of men and money to foreign fields 



314 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

that today their converts from heathenism are 
nearly three times as many as their church 
membership at home. If the evangelical Prot- 
estants of Great Britain and America gave as 
much per capita as do these Moravian brethren, 
we would have something more than sixty mil- 
lions of dollars with which to send forth mes- 
sengers of the truth; and, with that much at 
our command per annum, we could preach to 
every heathen in the world in less than ten 
years. Our ability in this matter is the meas- 
ure of our responsibility; and whether or not 
any such increase will come to our missionary 
endeavor we have already seen enough to un- 
derstand that Christ^s promise that "this Gospel 
of the Kingdom shall be preached in all the 
world" is going to have a literal fulfillment. 

Not a people or a place will he passed over. 

The time was when members of Protest- 
ant churches seriously questioned whether God 
meant His Gospel for all peoples. The opening 
up of new continents has brought to their at- 
tention whole races that were so low and loath- 
some that some said, "Nothing will ever save 
these nations." But the falsity of that opinion 
is now put beyond dispute. Those who have 
been fortunate enough to hear Mr. Fred Hag- 
gard describe graphically how the Gospel had 
changed a naked, filthy, sinful Assamese worn- 



THE WORLD EVANGELIZATION 315 

an into a refined, sensitive and sensible Chris- 
tian; and how, in five short years, whole heath- 
en villages in Assam had been so transformed 
by the power of God that one turning back to 
visit them was made to feel that he had been 
lifted out of heathenism and set down in a 
Christian land will doubt no more. 

The people of the Society Islands were not 
only savage, ferocious, and cannibalistic, but 
such was their immorality that Arthur Pierson 
says: "It would outrage all decency even to 
speak of the things which were done of them/' 
And yet young Williams had scarcely passed his 
boyhood when he was privileged to see their 
idols burned, their temples destroyed, all their 
customs changed, and chapels, seating hundreds, 
and in some instances thousands, erected. They 
being saved themselves became zealous mission- 
aries to the other benighted peoples of the 
earth, and it is written : ^^hen Mr. Williams 
first visited Earatonga, in 1823, he found them 
all heathen. When he left them in 1834 they 
were all Christians.'' 

Even Henry Martyn once wrote : "How shall 
it ever be possible to convince a Hindoo or a 
Brahmin of anything ? . . . Truly if ever I 
see a Hindoo a real believer in Jesus I shall 
see something more nearly approaching the 
resurrection of a dead body than anything I 



316 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

have yet seen/* But Martyn lived to see even 
that, and today we count our Hindoo converts 
by the hundreds. 

Mott tells us that Manchuria is about eight 
hundred miles long and five hundred miles wide. 
It has a population something short of twenty- 
five million, mostly Chinese. Twenty-three 
years before his book was written there were 
three converts there, and eighteen years later 
only four thousand baptized members of the 
churches. But at the time of his writing 
there were twenty thousand members, and the 
Eev. William Hunter, a missionary, expressed 
the opinion that ten times twenty thousand had 
finished forever with their idol worship, and 
that those who were definitely moving toward 
the acceptance of Christianity are even in ex- 
cess of two hundred thousand. 

Time fails one to speak of Murray's work in 
Southern Africa, of Baptist work on the Upper 
Congo; the salvation of the thousands of the 
wild men of Burmah ; the baptism of the thou- 
sands of the Telegus in the Lone Star Mission ; 
of "the wonderful story of Madagascar"; of 
Methodist success in China ; and of other fields 
whose romances of missions have been scarce 
less remarkable. But these suffice to show that 
there are no peoples so low but God can save 
them with the Gospel of His Son. 



THE WORLD EVANGELIZATION 317 

That there are none who will be passed over 
is evident from the present progress of civiliza- 
tion. Mott reported 454,730 miles of railway. 
That means eighteen air-lines around the world, 
and one hundred and seventy thousand miles of 
sub-marine cables, not to speak of the thou- 
sands and thousands of miles of over-land 
cables. Every nation is coming into instan- 
taneous touch with its neighbor, and ere many 
days the remotest heathen will be within 'phone 
distance of those who have received the light 
from Heaven. 

A long time now we have been singing, 

"Thou, whose almighty word 
Chaos and darkness heard, 

And took their flight. 
Hear us, we humbly pray; 
And where the gospel's day 
Shed not its glorious ray, 

Let there be light!" 

But it must occur to us that while we have 
addressed this appeal to Grod He turns it back 
to us, and if the people that now sit in dark- 
ness ever see the light, it will be only when 
we who are ministers of His 

"Move o'er the water's face, 
Bearing the lamp of grace." 

It is time we ceased asking God to do our work. 



318 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

The purpose of this proclamation is here de- 
fined. 

"This Gospel of the Kingdom shall be 
preached in all the world for a witness to all 
the nations/' When we speak of the evangel- 
ization of the world we do not necessarily mean 
the conversion of every man, woman and child 
in it. If that were required, even in the light 
of our largest blessings, we might expect cen- 
turies, if not millenniums to be expended on 
the effort. But to bear witness is an easier task 
and one readily within the power of this gen- 
eration. When we remember that there are one 
hundred and forty million Protestants in the 
world, and that all each of these need to do is 
to tell ten of his fellows the story of the Gos- 
pel, we realize how near the end we may be. 
When we think on this we are brought into 
sympathy with Dr. G. W. N^orthrup's arraign- 
ment of inactivity on the part of God's people. 
Some years ago at Cincinnati, when his de- 
nomination was in its annual assembly, he 
preached that wonderful sermon on "The Evan- 
gelization of the World" in which he said: 
"Why is it that the heresy of unbelief is re- 
garded with such apprehension or alarm, while 
the heresy of inaction is viewed with compara- 
tive indifference? Is faith without works any 
better than works without faith ? Are they not 



THE WORLD EVANGELIZATION 319 

alike dead and displeasing to God ; equally vain 
and perilous? To the heresy of inaction, far 
more than to the heresy of unbelief, is due the 
deplorable fact that the midnight darkness of 
heathenism still envelops nearly two-thirds of 
the population of the globe/' 
Again, we call your attention to 

THE CLIMAX OF CHRISTIAN EFFORT. 

^^And this Gospel of the Kingdom shall be 
preached in all the world as a witness to all 
the nations, and then shall the end come." 

That is the glorious consummation. It 
means first of all the end of this age. Who 
would not see it come ? When one looks round 
about and remembers that this has been an age 
peculiarly marked by sin, an age in which that 
great trinity of iniquities — the saloon, the gam- 
bling house, and the bagnio — have been daily 
growing in power, victimizing the multitudes; 
an age also in which ignorance and superstition 
and squalor have submerged the millions and 
brought untold sufferings to the innocent as 
well as to the guilty, he is ready to have it 
come to an end. 

Henry T. Chapman, of Leeds, England, 
quotes the author of a book on India as saying, 
"One day I stood near one of the great temples 
(of India) . With me was a friend. While we 



320 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

stood there there came a native woman carry- 
ing a little child in her arms. She took no no- 
tice of lis. But when she got to the foot of 
the temple steps she threw herself prone on 
the ground, holding up the baby in her arms. 
We looked and saw that the baby was ill-shapen, 
and had none of that beauty and loveliness 
which characterize infant life. Then she prayed 
this prayer: ^Oh, grant that my child may 
grow fair as other children; grant that it may 
grow comely, grant that it may grow strong! 
Oh, hear the cry of a mother, and of a moth- 
er's breaking heart!' And her prayer was fin- 
ished; she arose and was passing away when 
the missionary said, ^Friend, to whom have you 
prayed ?' She answered : 'I do not know ; but 
surely somewhere there must be someone to hear 
the cry of a mother's heart, and to keep a moth- 
er's heart from breaking.'" 

When this gospel of the kingdom shall be 
preached in all the world for a witness to all 
nations, then the end of such ignorance shall 
come. Oh, that it might be in this generation ! 

It is evident, also, that with that time Christ 
shall come. 

A secretary of Foreign Missions, Dr. Henry 
C. Mabie, commenting on this passage of Scrip- 
ture, says: ^'By 'end' here I understand the 
consummation. After the testimony of Peter — 



THE WORLD EVANGELIZATION 321 

Pentecost! After the testimony of Luther — 
Reformation! After the testimony of the Mo- 
ravians, the Careys, the Judsons, Livingstones, 
Morrisons, Duffs, and Patons the consumma- 
tion ! Christ does not tell us just what kind of 
a consummation. There are a great many kinds 
to be climaxed at last by the great, greater, 
greatest of all consummations — the personal 
coming of the Lord/^ 

No man can look out upon the earth today and 
witness the conflicts between rulers and nations, 
the necessity for sword and slaughter, without 
longing in his heart for the time to come when 
men shall cease from the shedding of blood, 
when oppression shall be no more, because God 
has fulfilled to His Son the promise of mak- 
ing Him "King of Kings and Lord of Lords,'' 
and privileged Him that universal dominion in 
which ^'all people, nations and languages shall 
serve Him" and given to Him that "everlasting 
kingdom'* that Daniel declares "shall never be 
destroyed." 

There are few prayers written into verse that 
one should plead more earnestly than this : 

"Hasten, Lord, the glorious time. 
When beneath Messiah's sway, 
Every nation, every clime, 
Shall the Gospel call obey. 



322 THE PERENNIAL REVIVAL 

Mightiest kings His power shall own. 

Heathen tribes His name adore; 
Satan and his host, o'erthrown, 

Bound in chains, shall hurt no more." 

Oh, we want to see it — the day of His coro- 
nation ! Thank God for the privilege of doing 
anything that shall hasten it. Thank God for 
the privilege of giving anything that shall make 
it more glorious when once it shall come; for 
the privilege of sending one's mite for the sal- 
vation of that multitude whose praises shall yet 
rock the earth and reach to Heaven. We be- 
lieve, by the grace of God, when that day is on, 
we shall meet our prayers again, and our money 
again, and all the sympathies we have ever felt, 
and all the sacrifices we have ever made, in 
the form of saved ones; and as we listen to 
those from Asia, from Africa, from the isles 
of the sea, joining their voices with those from 
Europe and from our own land, shouting the 
praises of "Him who sitteth upon the Throne" 
we shall only be sorry that we invested so little 
and prayed for them so seldom. 

They tell us that the Princess Eugenia, of 
Sweden, moved by the sight of the sick-poor in 
the island of Gottland, finding that her funds 
were exhausted, stripped her person of every 
jewel, and put the price thereof into a hospital. 
One day there came into the hospital a poor 



THE WORLD EVANGELIZATION 323 

woman, ignorant and suffering, and sinful. 
Eugenia prayed much for her. When the win- 
ter came on and the Princess had to depart for 
the city, she went to tell the woman good-bye 
and found her much changed in character. As 
the Princess approached her bed, the woman 
greeted her with these words : "I thank God 
that the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleans- 
eth us from all sin," and the tears of gratitude 
glistened in her deep blue eyes. As the Prin- 
cess was passing out she said to the matron: 
"In those tears of penitence I have seen my 
diamonds again." 



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